


Memory of Never

by ReminiscentLullaby



Series: The Beginning of Goodbye [6]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Family Drama, Gabenath Child, Gen, I was really dumb enough to think I wasn't gonna do this, Isolation, Mental Health Issues, Original Character(s), Post-Canon, Revelations, Trauma, but I'm glad I did
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27407254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReminiscentLullaby/pseuds/ReminiscentLullaby
Summary: Anaïs thought she knew everything about her family's history with the legendary jewels called the miraculous, including the stories of her brother Adrien's heroism and the reasons her parents, Gabriel and Nathalie, are still haunted by their guilt after all this time.But what she still has yet to learn is where she fits into the story.
Relationships: Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth/Nathalie Sancoeur
Series: The Beginning of Goodbye [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1493849
Comments: 63
Kudos: 57
Collections: GabeNath Book Club and Art Club Server





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Lol, I said SWBA was it and then it wasn't.
> 
> I just love Anaïs too much.
> 
> Have fun with this. I sure did.

Chapter One

Anaïs snipped away thirty-five centimeters of hair from between her index and middle finger, and her first thought was that she liked the result. She laid the bundle of black waves across the bathroom counter beside a pair of scissors she’d dug from her desk drawer just three minutes ago. Giving her head a little shake, she smiled at her reflection, and murmured to herself, “Look at that.” It was exactly what she was going for. 

She admired the new look for about fifteen seconds, angling her head back and forth to ensure both sides were even, before the next thought occurred to her: she would have to show her parents. Anaïs ran her fingers contemplatively through her hair as she considered her options. It might have been best to throw what was left of her locks into a bun until she could gauge their moods; with her father especially, his reaction to a certain rash decision she’s made could drastically differ depending on the day, but as long as she had a sense of how he was feeling, she could easily predict what he’d say to her and choose how best to proceed. But her mother was a slightly different story; to begin with, Anaïs had already suggested a number of days ago that she was itching for a pretty dramatic cut after so many years of having hair down past her waist, but her mom had had an unusual response, a response that caused a generally impulsive Anaïs to withhold her temptation nearly a week. Nathalie was just _like that_ sometimes, though, and the real challenge was going to be determining if she was in a decent enough headspace to let this go, the way she’d been able to let go things much worse than this, like the one time Anaïs had _ever_ snuck out of the house at night, to see a concert with her friend two nights before a big exam. Gabriel had been pretty livid about that, but Nathalie was mercifully calm. 

Anaïs realized she’d have to make a decision quickly, because it was nearly four o’clock, which meant her mother was going to be home soon. After tossing the hair she’d cut into the waste bin under the sink, Anaïs started to pull at the elastic around her wrist, thinking she’d ought to play it safe for the time being. But another glimpse at herself in the mirror made her pause. Honestly, she thought it looked great, and it wasn’t really that short. She didn’t believe such long and thick hair suited somebody as tall as she was anyway. 

_If they’re upset with me_ , she decided, _then it’ll be their problem. I’m happy_. 

Anaïs returned to her room to send a photo of the cut to Adrien, with the message, _I did a thing. I’ll let you know if Mom and Dad kill me._

She found it a little strange when the only thing he replied with a few minutes later was a thumbs-up, accompanied by no compliment or politely-disguised disapproval whatsoever (not that Adrien was the type to disapprove of a simple haircut). She almost teased him over this uncharacteristic lack of enthusiasm, when out of the bedroom window, she caught sight of a car rolling through the gate: her mother arriving home from work. 

“Wish me luck, Myrtille,” Ana muttered to the cat curled up on her bed. Myrtille yawned, stretching her forepaws across the comforter.

On the way down the stairs, Anaïs tossed her hair behind her shoulders, hoping that would conceal the change at first before she flipped it back forward again to reveal what she’d done. In her head, she practiced what to say to Nathalie if, for whatever reason mothers dislike their daughters altering their appearance, she had some criticism to assert, but the more responses she cycled through, the more she started to think she was worrying a little too much over nothing. Even if Nathalie didn’t like it, she was practical enough to know there was no use being upset over something that could grow back anyway (even if Ana certainly had no plan of letting it grow back any time soon). 

Anaïs paused at the bottom of the stairs, and a moment later the front door swung open. She held her breath as Nathalie stepped through.

“Hello, Ana,” she said. She didn’t look at her daughter at first, facing the row of hooks on the wall beside her and unbuttoning her coat. “How are you?”

“Fine. Mom.” 

“Yes?”

“I want to show you something.” 

“Okay, give me a moment.” From what Anaïs could tell, Nathalie seemed to be in a neutral mood. Sometimes, her mother’s emotions could be difficult to read. She had the power to hide the best and the worst of spirits behind a shiny cold exterior. Ana was pretty skilled at that too, but she could not always successfully see past Nathalie’s walls. 

She swallowed, rolled back her shoulders. “Mom, look.” 

As Nathalie glanced up, Ana pushed her hair forward, laying the ends of her waves smoothly against her collarbones. 

“I cut it myself. Not bad, right?”

“Anaïs.” 

There was a shape in Nathalie’s voice that Anaïs did not expect, and it was not the edge of displeasure she’d feared, nor a whorl of delighted surprise she’d hoped for. When Ana heard her name, she sensed a weight behind it, something pressing low into Nathalie’s chest as she spoke, something that was familiar yet so out of place that Ana could only scramble to draw some sort of connection, too distracted by the strangeness of Nathalie going shock-still, staring as if she had seen a ghost. 

The coat hung off one arm, the rest of it having fallen to the floor around her feet. Nathalie gazed at her daughter wide-eyed, the only detectable movement in her form being the subtle trembling of her head back and forth. She looked stunned, but more than stunned, she looked _scared_. Despite all the reactions Ana had imagined on the way down, this evident alarm didn’t cross her mind for even a moment. 

“Not bad, right?” she repeated, voice thin as tissue. 

It was not until she forced a smile across her lips that Nathalie’s rigid condition finally relaxed. Cautiously, not taking her eyes off of her daughter, she peeled the coat the rest of the way off her arm and hung it on the wall.

“You look like…”

“Mom.”

Nathalie’s eyes darkened. 

“Mom, what is it?”

“Anaïs, I asked you not to do that,” she said quietly. 

Her voice was brisk enough to send a shiver into Ana’s bones. She expected to hear more, but Nathalie was silent as she removed her boots, left them crookedly behind on the mat, and walked right past Anaïs to the stairs. She ascended to her bedroom with footsteps tolling through the open foyer, each like a hammer to Ana’s heart. The door shut with more force than Nathalie would typically exert, a single flare of heat amidst her cold. 

Anaïs certainly didn’t expect that. 

“Mom?” she called. Her voice was hollow. Maybe Nathalie didn’t hear, because she offered no response. 

Sitting on the bottom step, Ana heaved a quivering sigh through her teeth and rubbed the ends of her hair between tightly pinched fingers. Even if her mother had outright stated that she hated the look, Anaïs wouldn’t have believed that she’d done anything _wrong_. Nathalie’s reaction stirred up these spiraling sensations of guilt Anaïs wasn’t used to, like leaves cutting through the wind, solid and crisp, surrounded by chill. She brought her knees up to her chest.

Maybe she should have taken it more to heart, what had happened six days ago, when she first brought up the possibility of chopping off her hair. Nathalie had been in pretty good humor then, reading a book in her office with the cat at her feet, and she’d even seemed to be open to the idea when Anaïs initially voiced it. But then she’d asked, how short? And Ana gestured to her shoulders. 

“No,” she’d said, features going dim. 

No? Why, no?” Ana questioned.

“I don’t mind if you cut your hair. But mind the length.” 

“Mind the length? What? Mom, that’s hardly shorter than yours.” 

Nathalie had narrowed her eyes. Pale knuckles stood out plainly against the bright red cover of the book in her hold. Ana came to learn growing up that her mother had a nervous habit of clenching her hands; what Nathalie had to be _nervous_ about at the time, she wasn’t sure. “Anaïs, love, I’d like to forget this.”

“Forget what?” 

“This.”

“Are you saying I can’t get a perfectly normal hair cut?”

“No.” 

Exasperated, Ana had tossed her hands in the air. “Then what is the problem?” 

“There is no problem. We’re not talking about it.” 

Below Nathalie, Myrtille had opened her eyes and released a warbling _meow_. When Anaïs gave up on trying to understand this bizarre encounter, the cat had run out of the room with her. 

Anaïs felt a little stupid now, for not taking her mother seriously enough in that moment. Maybe it was because she had grown up learning to drop subjects as soon as she was asked that she didn’t know what to expect from the instance she chose not to. She’d taken a chance thinking this was the one time a sensitive topic wasn’t maybe all that sensitive. It was _her_ hair, after all. Why on earth did it matter so much? 

The thing was, Anaïs wasn’t ignorant. She’d understood for a long time why her parents were the way they were. As a child, she’d often be whisked away by Adrien on a fun adventure out in the city, or to his and Marinette’s apartment where she’d have a chance to bake with her sister-in-law all afternoon. She’d be told, “Mom is sad today,” or “Dad is stressed”, and when she wondered why, she often went unanswered. But one time, Anaïs asked the question again, and Marinette, scraping cake batter off a spatula, answered, “They feel weighed down.” 

“Weighed down?”

“Sometimes things happen to you that can make you feel really heavy inside.” Marinette had a taste of the batter. “Your parents have been through a lot, Ana. We’ll tell you more about it when you’re old enough to understand. Promise.” 

By _old enough to understand_ she might have meant _old enough to keep a secret_ – or a few. Anaïs’s tenth birthday marked the beginning of a long process to comprehend the story her family had told her about the people they used to be. There was never a point where it all made sense at once, but she did start to understand what Marinette had told her that other day. She could see the way the force of gravity seemed to press down stronger upon the backs of her parents: on Gabriel, who could utterly panic at the notion that his daughter was feeling angry with him, because if she was angry with him, he was terrified that meant she saw something villainous behind his naturally cool and wary disposition; on Nathalie, who had numerous habits Adrien said she didn’t used to exhibit, like anxiously second guessing almost every choice she made around her child, like avoiding confrontation by working until three AM on some occasions or knocking out and sleeping through most of the weekend on others, like isolating herself at the slightest sign that she’d made a mistake.

It took years, but Anaïs understood. Her parents were haunted by figures from a past she was never around to see, but they shaped everything about how Gabriel and Nathalie tried to raise her. And they really did try, even if she had to rely on Adrien and Marinette and school and art some of the time. Hawkmoth and Mayura were long dead, but they had always made a lot of things difficult, a lot of serious conversations her parents were afraid of screwing up, a lot of instances where they didn’t want to be the bad guys so Ana didn’t have to see them the way they saw themselves. It didn’t really matter how many times she tried to tell them she would never hate them for it; sometimes talking about it only seemed to make things worse. But that could be lived with. Her parents taught her everything she knew about art. Her father was supportive. Her mother made her selfless and brave. They were happy most of the time. 

However, that still didn’t make the days in between easy. On the stairs, Anaïs dragged her palms down her face, nearly taking some skin with her, because she should’ve known better than this by now, should’ve known better than to do something she knew had the potential to upset her mother, who’d already made herself clear. 

This time around, she was just…confused. So many jagged pieces had started to fit together over the last several years to create an image Anaïs could almost recognize, obscured like frosted glass but hiding familiar shapes and familiar colors. But _hair_ , hair didn’t fit anywhere in that picture. Hair didn’t open any doors that remained sealed around her or translate an inkling of some dubious thought into a language she could understand. It wasn’t the curiosity she’d learned to withhold. It wasn’t the hours she’d spent secretly trying to reconcile photographs of Hawkmoth and Mayura with the parents she knew.

But maybe it was the question she’d always been dying to ask them, the “Why are you still so afraid?”

After a minute of sitting in her bewildered regret, Ana looked towards the hallway leading to her father’s atelier, where she knew he didn’t like to be disturbed during the day. Despite this, she was compelled to rise to her feet and make her way. By now, there was certainly no way to predict Gabriel’s reaction to the cut; though Nathalie’s was bizarre, she had a feeling there was a reason for it that her father would immediately detect the second he saw her. And she was desperate for some clarity. 

Ana’s hand was shaking as she raised it to the door. She gave a clumsy rap of her knuckles.

“Yes?” Gabriel’s gruff voice sounded somewhere on the other side. His response was short as was typical whenever someone tried to get his attention during his work hours. Anaïs knew the door wouldn’t be opened until he knew what was going on, as much as she would prefer not to stand out in the hallway to explain what he might better see for himself. 

“Dad,” she murmured, leaning her forehead against the door. “Um, I think – I think I did something wrong.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“It’s Mom.” 

“What about your mother?”

“I upset her. She went to her room.”

She heard his footsteps approaching and stepped back, heart pumping wildly. The lock on the door unclicked, and Gabriel appeared with his thick gray eyebrows knit into an inquisitive scowl. But it didn’t take long for his expression to change, for a second later, once his gaze had settled on his daughter hanging her head low, his face fell. 

“Ana –” 

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling back her hair. “I just wanted a haircut. I didn’t think it would be a big deal, but Mom –” She gestured down the hallway, towards the foyer. “She said she didn’t want me to do it, but I thought she was just being weird that day and wouldn’t really care. Now she’s…I’m sorry.”

Gabriel watched his daughter warily, his shoulders rising and falling with quickened breath. He said nothing for a long, agonizing moment, during which a flicker of recognition crossed across his face like a passing light. Then, he reached out and touched Anaïs’s hair, holding the ends of it in the palm of his hand. 

“It looks alright.” 

His voice was uncharacteristically quiet. Blue-gray eyes like her own looked her up and down.

“It suits you.”

Ana mumbled, “It does?”

“Yes,” he replied thickly. “It does. Are you okay?”

“Me? I’m fine, I guess. I’m worried about Mom.” She turned her head, and the hair slipped out from her father’s hand. 

“What did she say?”

“She looked at me like she was afraid – maybe she was just shocked, I don’t know. But she stormed up to her room, and she looks, well, you know how she gets sometimes. Like that.” 

“I see. I’ll take care of it,” Gabriel said, beginning to step past his daughter, but Anaïs held out a hand.

“But why would she react like that?” she asked. “She’s been doing pretty well lately, otherwise, and this, this just doesn’t add up. I know it’s a change, but it’s not like I gave it a buzz-cut and dyed it neon green. Even if I did, I didn’t think you guys would hate it _that_ much.” 

“Your mother would have probably hated that less.”

Ana winced. “What does that mean? What’s _wrong_ with this? I don’t understand.”

Gabriel folded his hands behind his back, glancing down at his feet. “It’s not easy to explain.”

She scoffed. “Nothing is with you guys, huh?”

“Anaïs,” he warned. 

“What, am I wrong? Do you think it’s easy for me to have to walk on eggshells around you all of the time? I can’t even cut my hair to _shoulder-_ length without sending Mom into an episode.” Tears stung Anaïs’s eyes. “You’re not the only ones terrified of screwing up.”

Her father stared at her wordless, his jaw and brow rigid. 

“Well,” Ana sniffled, crossing her arms, “I’m glad you don’t think it’s ugly.”

Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut and deeply exhaled. “Anaïs, at some point, we’ll have a conversation about this. I promise you.” 

“‘At some point?’ Dad –” 

“Trust me,” he said, taking her by the shoulder. 

Anaïs held his gaze, hoping he could see the fire in her own. Despite all the secrets she knew, she still felt she’d left suspended in the dark for way too long, and every time she reached out, the only thing she’d hit was a wall. 

“I’m going to check on your mother.” Gabriel released her and went. Anaïs followed him out to the foyer, where she stood watching him climb the stairs up to his bedroom, knock gently on the closed door, call “Nathalie?” and swiftly enter. 

Several minutes later, Anaïs stood on the back porch beneath the overcast February sky, one ungloved hand stuffed into the pocket of her coat and the other pressing her cellphone to her ear. She tapped her boot against the railing repeatedly as she waited for Adrien to pick up, eyes shifting back and forth from the dormant garden to the pair of windows above her head, the one looking out from her parents’ bedroom. It seemed the curtains were closed.

“Hello?”

Anaïs gripped the phone. “You didn’t comment on my haircut,” she said at once. 

There was silence on the other end broken only by the background noise of some babbling children, likely her nephews. She’d need to remember to wish them a happy birthday soon. Then, over the course of a few seconds, the muffled voices faded away, and Ana heard the closing of a door. Adrien replied, “I hope you didn’t take it the wrong way.”

“Is there even a right way?” she questioned, rolling her eyes. “Adrien, you should have warned me.” 

“Warned you?”

“Yeah, I know for a fact you were sure Mom would freak out about this. You’re too unconditionally supportive not to have given me profuse compliments the second you got that picture. Why do you think I told you first? Ego-boost.” 

He gave an amused sigh, but when he responded he sounded serious. “I didn’t want to say anything in the case Father and Nathalie were actually fine with it. Figured I would play it safe.” 

“Well, Dad seemed like he could at least tolerate it. Said it looked ‘alright’ which is just what everybody wants to hear. But Mom – she’s definitely upstairs spiraling right now, and you know why. Dad said they’d explain, but I don’t know when that’s going to be or if he’s actually going to keep his word, so you’re going to be my informant.” 

“I understand your frustration, but it’s not my place,” Adrien said. 

Anaïs only laughed bitterly. 

“Listen, the last thing I want to do is make this worse for you,” he insisted. “It’s not going to be an easy thing to hear, and I’m not the person to hear it from. Not alone anyway.”

“Geez, you’re laying it on thick. And you really thought it was appropriate to ‘play it safe’ instead of letting me know I’d apparently made some life-altering mistake?”

“Anaïs, imagine if I told you about Hawkmoth and Mayura without them knowing I did it.”

She reeled at that gravity of his words, turning her back to the garden and leaning against the rail. “Whoa – what?” she said deeply. Her voice trembled in her chest. “What do you mean? Does this really have _anything_ to do with that?” 

“Tangentially.”

“My _hair_?”

There was another pause on the other end, and Anaïs waited for her brother’s reply with bated breath. At long last, he inhaled sharply and said, “Here’s what I can tell you now, Ana.”

She dared to prompt him, “What?”

“This is not about your hair,” he stated matter-of-factly, and Anaïs could clearly envision his normally bright emerald gaze dimming under the grimness of his voice. “This is about Nathalie and Father seeing something in you that frightens them.”

The winter chill sitting on Anaïs’s skin sank deeper into her body. “What?” she repeated, breathlessly this time.

“It’s become a lot harder for them as you’ve gotten older. For all of us. You’re almost seventeen and we – we know by now that everything is fine, but that doesn’t erase a lot of our more…painful experiences.”

“Adrien, you’re freaking me out. I don’t understand.”

“You will. I’ll call them tonight. I think you have the right to know, and a long time ago, they said they would tell you.” He lowered his voice. “It’s not your fault, got it? You didn’t do anything wrong. This is a complicated and delicate situation.” 

“How many of those have you guys been through?” whispered Anaïs.

“Just a couple.”

Anaïs sank her teeth into her bottom lip. She looked directly forward, into the glass of the backdoor to see her reflection standing slouched against the rail, a six-foot-three, raven-haired, blue-eyed teenager in high-heeled boots and a blood-red leather trench-coat, who’d always _looked_ more like an Agreste than Adrien with his golden hair and green eyes. But ever since she’d learned what lives they used to lead, she’d only been able to sense herself drifting away from them all. Her mother, her father, Adrien, and even Marinette, they all knew how and why each other felt the things they felt. They’d all been there to witness it. They knew each other’s pain. Anaïs could only pretend to. She could only skirt around razor edges fruitlessly hoping they would dull, while the rest of her family shared scars she could hardly even see.

“Ana?” 

She wiped her eyes, cursing at the eyeliner that smudged off on her hand. “Yeah?”

“It’s gonna be okay. Nathalie’s gonna be okay. She needs her time to process, and then we’ll be able to tell you everything.”

“I feel really alone,” she confessed.

“I know. I’m sorry.” 

Anaïs knew he was sincere. Even if it wasn’t evident in his voice, Adrien was too earnest by nature to tell her something so crucial when he didn’t mean it; however, there were tongues of flame being stoked within her, the crackle and simmering of grievances she’d never been able to vent burning through a fuel source that felt endless as the mystery. Her face was warm, her hands fiercely clenched. She had the urge to throw the phone. 

“I have to go. The kids need my attention.”

“Adrien…”

“You can text me if you need to. This’ll all make sense soon, okay?”

She didn’t want to cry any harder, so she didn’t respond. Adrien said goodbye and hung up, leaving Anaïs on the porch with a freezing hand still clutching the phone up to her face. She was all too close to satisfying her temptation, to launching the thing over the garden so it hit the wall surrounding the property and smashed into unsalvageable pieces. 

But instead she wrenched her arm down from her ear, dropping the cell phone in the pocket of her coat. She walked inside and found the atelier door still hanging wide open, not that she expected her father to have been able to console Nathalie in such little time, but it was a sight which made the house itself feel particularly empty and quiet to her. 

The door she passed which was closed was that of her parents’ bedroom, and she did not bother leaning her ear against it to try to make out any of their conversation. When she walked by, it was her father’s muffled voice she heard somewhere within, and he was speaking so low that she figured it wasn’t worth the effort to strain to hear. She hardly imagined she’d catch anything she hadn’t already heard at one point or many over the years, on the nights she’d stood before their door in her pajamas eavesdropping on two insomniacs trying to survive until the sunrise, or on days they had to retreat to the next room over when they couldn’t wait for dark to let the weight of the world set in. 

She returned to her bathroom, half in a trance, curling her fingers around the scissors and coming dangerously close to chopping off a few extra inches as if that could instantaneously fix the mess she made, or make a new one to steal her from the wreckage around her now. But Myrtille bumped into her ankles, stirring her out of that foolishness. A high-pitched meow quivered down below, and the cat blinked up with her round blue eyes, shaking out her dusty gray coat. 

“Thanks.”

She dropped the scissors and crouched down to scratch Myrtille between the ears. Purring, she nudged her face into Ana’s palm, flicking her fluffy tail-tip. 

“You weren’t around for all of that either, were you?” murmured Anaïs.

The cat ran her tongue across her owner’s finger. 

“At least I have that in common with you.” 

She scooped Myrtille up into her arms and carried her to her bed, where they both flopped down and laid still until all the orange streaks of sun had faded to gray.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: *slaps the Agrestes*  
> Me: This bad boy can fit so much fucking trauma in it
> 
> (It gets a little heavy this chapter)

Chapter Two

A week later, Anaïs started to get restless.

She had texted Adrien the day after cutting her hair to ask if he had done as he promised and called her parents regarding whatever secret it was that remained in the vault.

 _Yes_ , he'd responded, _and we're all in agreement that we should talk about it._

_When?_

_Soon. Be patient. They need a little more time to prepare, but it won't be long_.

She tried to take his word for it. She hadn't spent a great deal of her life pretending to ignore problems for nothing. Anaïs threw herself out of her bed and then threw herself again into several consecutive days of focused schoolwork, painting, piano, songwriting, anything necessary to absorb the brunt of her anxiety so she didn't have to lie waiting in a trench of it. That didn't stop her heart from nearly leaping out of her chest whenever one of her parents approached her. She always forced her features flat and feared they could somehow detect the pounding of her pulse.

But they were playing a game of pretend as well. Neither Gabriel nor Nathalie acknowledged what had happened to spark all of this, not explicitly anyway. The only thing she heard of it was the night after, when her father came to knock on her door and inform her, "Your mother's fine. She was just shocked."

"She seemed more than shocked."

"Well, she isn't mad at you in any case."

Anaïs scratched under Myrtille's chin. "Can Mom come talk to me?"

"She's gone to sleep early."

"Oh." She looked down at her feet. "That's okay."

But when Anaïs next did see her mother, early the next morning before leaving for school, Nathalie didn't seem in the place to have the conversation her daughter was quietly waiting for. When asked if she was okay, she offered a small smile and an even smaller nod.

"You don't have to worry about me, Ana."

But Nathalie had already made that a little difficult. Anaïs spent the week with her hair up in a bun, only taking it down when she was at school. The compliments she received from her best friend Kari and a few other classmates were nice, but they couldn't quite untie the knot in her stomach whenever she remembered the looks on her parents' faces as they saw it for the first time, or Adrien's words that he'd spoken on the phone: _This is about Nathalie and Father seeing something in you that frightens them._

Sometimes, while at her piano, attempting to drown herself in music to avoid thinking about what he'd meant by that, she'd get pulled back to the surface all at once. The briefest glimpse in the mirror against the nearest wall could make her freeze like she'd broken into frigid air. She stared at herself, at her nose like her mother's, at her eyes like her dad's, the hair she was now tempted to let fall down upon her shoulders, just so she could try to identify what it was that scared them so much.

But then she'd shake her head and continue playing, forcing herself in the water once again. It wasn't any use. She hadn't been there to see the beast when it first emerged. She couldn't name it now. Even if a part of it supposedly lived in her.

She endured a week of this, questions going unanswered, smiles forced to make her forget, and all the while Anaïs poured herself out into other things until there was nothing left to pour. A week into waiting, she dropped her paintbrush and lifted her fingers from the keys and wondered if any of them had a clue how much this was starting to wear on her, if they'd taken it to heart when she told them she was sick of the dance.

On the weekend, she couldn't sleep at night. Anaïs laid on her back, knees bent and feet tapping, an anxious move that disturbed the cat enough to make her to slip out of the room. A whirlwind of conflicting thoughts circulated through her head as she questioned whether she could be patient as Adrien suggested, be considerate of how challenging this was for her family, bury the outrage indefinitely until they were ready, whenever that may be. But Anaïs scowled up at the ceiling, because that was the role she had played all her life. And it was starting to weigh her down.

They couldn't do this to her. They couldn't claim there was something about her that hurt them and not tell her what. They couldn't let her question everything about herself while they shielded the truth in their thornbush hearts.

That was why, the next day at dinner, Anaïs deliberately left her hair down and minded not her chilly disposition. She wasn't going to preserve her parents' comfort anymore, not as long as they retained their explanation of why she ought to. Through most of the meal, she held silent, and when she spoke, prompted by a question from one of them, she refused to glance their way, keeping her eyes on her plate.

Fifteen minutes into this, Nathalie's voice softly cut in, "Ana, are you okay?"

She responded with a brisk shake of her head.

"I thought you've seemed tired," her mother went on. "And troubled."

"I couldn't sleep last night."

"What's wrong?"

The corner of her lips lifted into a sardonic smirk. She dropped her fork and folded her hands on the table in front of her. "I think you might know better than I do, actually."

Neither of her parents said anything in reply to this, but the force of their silence sank into the room like claws into skin. The hair on the back of Ana's neck stood on end. When she glanced up at last, she watched them exchange a look across the table. Nathalie was biting the inside of her cheek, Gabriel frowning, both of them plainly unsure of themselves.

"I really don't know for how long you assume I'm going to keep waiting around," Anaïs murmured, drawing their gazes back to her. "I can't keep pretending that everything is fine when I know it isn't. You've all said so one way or another. Adrien too."

"He called us last week," Gabriel replied.

"He said he would."

"We told him we'd figure out how to go about this."

Nathalie shifted in her seat. Under her breath, she said, "I don't want to talk about this now."

"We're not talking about it now," Gabriel assured her.

"Then _when_?" Ana demanded. "At least tell me that."

"Your tone, Anaïs," he warned with a sharp look.

"You're not even sure, are you?" Anaïs leaned back in her chair, combing her fingers through the ends of her hair and waiting on a response from either of them, but their silence seemed response enough. Of course, they weren't sure. "I have the right to be a little angry, alright?" she said to her father. "I don't know what you guys expect when you won't tell me anything."

Gabriel sighed. He removed his glasses and set them down beside his fork. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he grumbled. "Yes, yes, we know. You're right."

"Listen, I just –" Nathalie took a deep breath, unballing her fists, relaxing her bone-white knuckles. She splayed her hands out across the table to keep her fingers from wrenching back together. "Listen, Ana, love, I don't want this to be a confrontation. I need this to be calm. And I need you to trust that I've always intended to talk about this eventually. I just haven't figured out how to have the conversation yet. It's not that I don't want to."

"You've had at least sixteen years to prepare, haven't you?" Anaïs retorted.

"Ana, this has been eating at us for almost as long as you've been alive. Chewed us down to the bone," Nathalie said, lowering her chin to her throat. "You underestimate how impossible this is."

Sick of enigmas and with boiling blood, Anaïs sneered, "What's more impossible than the two of you being infamous domestic magical terrorists?"

"Anaïs!" snapped Gabriel.

Nathalie's eyes flared. "You would be _shocked_."

Anaïs was too indignant to let the ferocity of her parents' tones make her hesitate, nor would she let herself be deterred by the tears gathering along her waterline, blurring her vision of their dismayed expressions. "I guess I anticipated that after telling me a secret like that that we'd be comfortable telling each other anything. You always told me that was the relationship you wanted to have."

"It is!" Nathalie exclaimed. "God, Anaïs, more than anything. I want that."

"Then why do I feel like I can't talk to you?" she cried.

Her mother winced, asking hollowly, "You do?"

Taking a napkin to her eyes, Anaïs swallowed some of the fire on her tongue. She was beginning to sense the burn of her own impatient fury, and she felt guilty for her word choice. More softly, she said. "Most of the time, no. No, I don't. But lately…sometimes, Mom, it's hard. I don't want to make it sound like I envy what you all went through, but I feel like the black sheep, you know? There's nothing that ties me back to the people you used to be, and you're so ashamed of it. You shut me out of that part of your life, and I get it, but…" She wrinkled her nose. "I want to know you."

Nathalie stared in awestruck silence. Then, she looked across the table at her husband, mouth hanging ajar as if she had something to say.

But Anaïs made the mistake of trying to fill the silence, for silence had started to discourage her. "But I feel like I can't. I feel like you don't let me."

"Darling -"

"It's difficult for me to just exist in this house when I have to worry about what you'll think of my hair."

Her mother's gaze snapped back. "I'd asked you not to," she whispered, much the same way she had said something similar a week before.

And maybe, Anaïs realized, she'd gotten ahold of something that she just let stupidly slip out of her grip. "But this is what I mean. You never told me why."

"I couldn't. I wasn't able. And before you say that's ridiculous, I _know_ it is. I know it doesn't make any sense, but it's not as though the real answer would have seemed anymore reasonable to you. You look so much like…"

"Like what?"

Nathalie put her head in her hands. "I'm so sorry. I was never trying to make anything more difficult for you. You were always supposed to feel comfortable talking to _us_."

"What, but not the other way around?" Anaïs asked, frustrated that another one of her questions had been dodged. Her words trembled. "I would have thought you respected me enough to give me a simple explanation."

"It's not simple," Gabriel stressed, piping up again after a couple minutes of wary silence. Anaïs held his gaze a moment, thrown by its anguished light. "And we do respect you, Anaïs. This isn't about that."

"How am I to know?" she asked boldly.

"I can't pretend not to understand what's gotten into you," he growled, "But I don't appreciate it. You're making this harder than it needs to be. Stop."

"Gabriel," Nathalie murmured, rubbing her temples.

"She doesn't get it."

"Not if you don't tell me."

"We can't just _tell_ you."

"Are you serious?"

Gabriel released a frustrated groan. " _Gravely_."

Nathalie stood up. She brushed her fly-away hairs against the side of her head and then clutched the back of her neck. "We love you, Anaïs," she began, her voice low and shaking. "We love you and we respect you and if you question any part of that, I'm sorry."

"Nathalie," Gabriel said.

"But like I said," she continued, "I don't want this to be a confrontation. It's not something I can handle. I've dealt with more than enough crying and screaming matches about things people would destroy themselves over to sit through a second more of this. It's too keen a reminder."

Given crying and screaming matches were by no means a common occurrence in their house, Anaïs could only look to her father for some clarity on the bizarre comment, but Gabriel leaned back in his chair, mouth clamping shut. That he seemed to know what she was talking about only confused Ana further.

"I need –" Nathalie breathed in sharply. Her eyes watered. "I need to think about this. Or to not think about this. I don't know. I just can't be here. "

"Nathalie –"

"Mom –"

She departed the room.

Anaïs was next to her feet, throwing her arms out to the side. "That isn't what I wanted. I'm not trying to prolong this, Dad. We're going in circles for nothing."

Gabriel sighed. He slipped his glasses back on his face. "We've been going in circles for years and years. But it's not for nothing."

"I don't understand what can be worse than what I already know. Dad, what am I supposed to think?" She stared at him helplessly as he pushed back his chair and stood, reaching across the table to grab his wife's unfinished plate to stack on top of his own. She could see the gloom of unreadable thought on his visage. He looked as though the conversation had aged him several years. The lines on his face seemed deeper. Most of the time, she could forget that her father was almost sixty. The weight of memory pressed into his skin now, like scars.

"I don't know…" he replied, shaking his head, "what I would prefer you believe."

"Dad."

"My dear, I'm sorry." Gabriel looked at his daughter. The grief on his face was so overt that she sensed a pang of that emotion deep in her chest, tolling like a bell. The anger he'd previously exhibited had dissolved as soon as Nathalie left the room, and it was because he evidently no longer had the energy to be mad. "I'm sorry we're making this so hard on you. I know we're not the only ones suffering for our mistakes."

"I don't think this had to happen if you could just let it go. When you won't talk about what happened, it feels like you're clinging to it. I'm not mad at you for Hawkmoth and Mayura. Adrien's not mad at you for Hawkmoth and Mayura. Nobody else even knows about it, so they aren't mad at you either. I'm upset because…" Anaïs crumpled the napkin in her fist and dropped it on the table. "I'm upset because of what you let it do to you. You're not fair to yourselves, and because you're not fair to yourselves, you can't be fair to me either."

There was a sad and tired smile on her father's face. "Wow," was all he said.

"What, Dad?"

"The irony is all," he replied. He slowly pushed his seat back under the table. "We wanted to do better this time."

Ana recoiled. _This time?_ "You…you didn't do poorly," she said gently, setting a hand on her father's arm. "You and Mom have raised me well. I mean that. And I'm grateful. It's just this one thing."

"One monster of a thing," he grumbled.

Ana hugged him. "I'm sorry, Dad."

"Don't be, love. It's okay."

"I just want to know what's going on."

"You will find out," he assured her, pulling back to look her in the eye. "I don't want my promises to you to be empty, my dear. I swore to you, I would bring us…" he trailed off. Anaïs's arms fell back to her side as he backed several paces and grabbed the plates off the table. "I would do right by you."

"Dad…"

He brought the dishes to the kitchen, and Anaïs merely watched him go.

* * *

Furious piano-playing ensured Myrtille wanted to be nowhere nearby. Anaïs's fingers flew across the keys and generated something just shy of a cacophony, just barely listenable. Layers of notes wrestling with each other in the air, powerful discontent rippled down through Ana's arms from her heart, which drummed like the base of her song. Her face was hot. Her nose was scrunched. Her hair was wild and in her face.

She really didn't want to admit how scared she was.

The room was almost totally dark but for the one desk light she had on across the room, and it cast her frantic shadow on the mulberry wall. She looked like a giant carving into stone, and she wished she was big enough and strong enough to do such a thing with her bare hands. Ana felt small. She felt like she needed to do something. She felt like there was nothing she could do.

Wait. Wait for them to be ready. Wait for them to be ready even though it was eating her up inside, one feeling leading to another, confusion into loneliness into anger into…the one that came next, the one she was pretending not to be.

But –

Her finger slipped, playing the wrong note.

But what could be so awful to them now, after everything they'd already admitted? What were they trying to make up for? What were they still running away from that she didn't know?

Sometimes piano could wear her out more than anything else. When the song crescendoed and crashed into a jarring finale, she realized she was out of breath. Her fingertips never stopped, though, pressing lightly back and forth on a few random keys once the "song" had ended. Anaïs was sick of silence.

After wiping the sweat from her brow, she went on playing. Nonsense at first, like the first song, but soon enough the notes fell into a familiar pattern. A song she had written in the last week, one that had been meant to distract her. As it fluttered out from beneath her fingers, however, she realized it could have hardly been described as a distraction. The melody, slow and mournful, twisted her heart.

She'd come up with words to go along with it, but she had never written them down. Ana hummed the tune, raking her memory. Something about strangers and getting older. Something about forgiveness and not being able to breathe.

The playing stuttered. She couldn't think straight. Ana tried to _da-dee-da_ through the melody, hoping it could manifest into coherent language, into the proper product she'd created during the week, but her head felt like it was made of clay. The more she played the song, over and over, the less it was sounding like hers. Her fingers stiffened. She didn't want to get lost in this too. She needed something to be familiar and clear.

"How many times do we _da, da-da, da, da_ …" she sang under her breath. She couldn't remember the rest of the line. Why didn't she write it down?

"Before we can…" She stopped. It was on the tip of her tongue.

No, it wasn't. It was gone. She kept playing. Tiredly. She didn't much try to lift her fingers from the keys before they moved to the next. The song sounded mangled.

Part of her longed for a time when she knew nothing at all. So she wouldn't feel stupid for forgetting her own song, so she wouldn't have anything to measure her expectations up against, or wonder, what could be so terrible? What could be so terrible and still be seen inside of her?

Anaïs sniffled and tucked some hair behind her ear. She paused her playing for a moment, letting her eyes dart across the keys before her fingertips found their place again.

She produced the first notes of one of the first songs she'd ever learned, sitting in one of her parents' lap at five or six years old while they guided her hands across the keys. Bright but soft, slow but rippling. She let the notes linger for a second before she started again, easing into the rhythm of a song she could never forget, a song that could never betray her, with words that sprang to mind as if she knew them as well as her own name. She remembered her mother singing them into her ear when she was very young. She remembered singing them to herself as she grew up, painting or studying or holding her niece and nephews as babies.

They belonged to a simpler time, a time she was longing for now.

Anaïs let her body relax, her hands move with fluency. She sang:

" _When our troubles call  
_ " _And lead us to the edge,  
_ " _I'll hold while we fall.  
_ " _My darling, hold your breath."_

She felt herself smiling. It was a sad smile, which tugged at her heart as much as her lips, but it felt good to let the scowl break.

" _Someday our bones will mend,  
_ " _Someday, we'll fly again,  
_ " _Someday, we'll fly again."_

Gently, the song dipped and rose again. Anaïs gave the simple arrangement a bit of a flourish, like the music was twirling through the air.

And then it suddenly stopped.

Anaïs had frozen. In the mirror against the wall, she saw her mother standing in the doorway. Nathalie's hand was wrapped around the handle, and she met her daughter's startled gaze with a somber one of her own. Ana had no idea for how long she had been there.

"Oh – Mom."

"Ana…"

"I didn't notice you come in."

"I heard you playing."

"I've been playing for a while."

"I heard you playing that song. I haven't heard it in a very long time. I wanted to listen better."

Nathalie was already dressed for bed. She'd wiped the makeup off her face and even in the bedroom's dim light, Anaïs thought she looked pale. Folding her robe tighter around her body, Nathalie pushed the door shut behind her and traversed the space over to the piano.

Anaïs watched her in the reflection for a moment, continuing to hold her stare for the multiple wordless seconds she stood behind the bench, until sucking in a deep breath and standing up to face her. As soon as she had turned around, Nathalie sighed, and Anaïs could see very clearly that there were tears in her eyes.

"Oh, geez, Mom…"

Nathalie shook her head. She raised a hand, and it trembled hesitantly in the air between them before resting against Anaïs's face. Her mother's skin was ice cold, and she stiffened under the intimate touch.

"Look at you," Nathalie whispered. The focus in her eyes wavered. "You look so much like her."

Ana took her wrist. "Like who?"

"Well, like…like you." Nathalie seemed to notice that her own statement didn't make any sense, for she chuckled incredulously at herself and glanced down. "Gosh," she muttered, "How am I going to say it?"

Guiding Nathalie's hand back down to her side, Anaïs insisted, "It's going to be fine, Mom. I want to know." She hoped she had masked the fear in her voice well enough for her generally perceptive mother to omit it.

"But will you always want to know? Maybe you're lucky not to. Every day I wish I could forget."

Anaïs felt especially self-conscious of her hair right now, tossing it all back behind her shoulders. "How about we don't talk about it tonight, okay? I'm sorry about dinner. Now's not the time, you're right."

"All these years you have spent feeling like you couldn't reach me through this pain," Nathalie said, like she hadn't heard her. She grappled for her daughter's hand as if Anaïs was a moor, squeezing tight enough to crack a knuckle. "You know, I have always had trouble telling people what is wrong. I don't know why. Perhaps, I thought I was doing you a favor by keeping you away from that side of me, but all I accomplished was the one thing I was determined not to: prevent you from knowing who we are. I was afraid of too much time passing, of it being too late, yet here we are now."

"You're being too hard on yourself," Anaïs said. "I've said, it's just this one thing. You're good parents. You and Dad. I mean it."

Nathalie's expression warped. For a split second, she looked as though she was touched by her daughter's reassurance, but then her brow twitched. A tear slid free, trailing down her cheek. "It's strange to hear her say that," she whispered.

"What?" This was the second time Nathalie had referred to some mysterious "her".

"I have spent all this time wondering if you could be gracious enough to forgive us, when I don't even know if you could believe us first," her mother went on. "Why should you believe us? Why should – why should _you_ believe us?"

"Wait, what about me? Who are you talking about?"

"You," Nathalie answered emphatically, and Anaïs flinched. "You're not going to believe us. When you learn the truth, I would be surprised if you didn't laugh. Or call us all sick in the head."

Ice cold shot into Anaïs's scalp and down her spine. "Mom, for the love of – don't say something like that," she replied.

"It's true. I know how this will play out. I know what you're like. I've seen it." Nathalie's gaze flicked back up sharply.

"I've never called you –" Anaïs tugged her hand out of her mother's grip. "I would _never_ say that. To any of you."

"You've said worse."

" _When_?" Ana demanded.

"A long time ago," Nathalie murmured. But then, there was a shift of the darkness in her eyes and she blinked rapidly, backing up a pace. "Or – never. Never. You would never…"

Something wasn't right. Anaïs stepped to the side and gestured for the bench below her, holding out another hand lightly against Nathalie's shoulder. "Mom. Sit down. Please."

"I don't know what I'm saying."

"Mom."

"You didn't trust us, Anaïs."

"I do trust you."

"I know. You _didn't_. We couldn't say a word without hurting you. We'd already made too many mistakes and there was nothing else we could do. I don't want things to be that way again."

"Please stop talking," Anaïs begged.

Nathalie clasped her head. "And now I'm spewing nonsense. You don't get it."

When Nathalie wouldn't move on her own, Anaïs took her by the arm and pulled her towards the seat. As she finally sank down, Anaïs asked, "Do you need help? Should I get Dad?"

"Help? He already tried."

"Dad knows how to deal with this. I don't. I'm going to call for him."

Nathalie shook her head. "It's no use. He couldn't help you either."

"Help _me_?" Almost nauseous with unease, Anaïs dropped to one knee and looked desperately up into her mother's face. She didn't know what to say, what to ask, if it would be better to stay silent until whatever was going on stopped going on. She'd only seen glimpses of this before, of her mother being sucked into her memory so deeply that she couldn't distinguish between past and present, and on those rare and sparse occasions, which she could only count on one hand, she'd always known to back away, let her father step in, or Adrien, someone who at least had a clue what to do. Ana had never been in the thick of the fog alongside her, not knowing if it would be best to parse it out or wait for it to pass. Helplessly speechless, Anaïs could only think to place a comforting hand on her mother's leg.

Nathalie stared across the room with swollen red eyes, thankfully remaining quiet for a few minutes before her head shifted and she glanced down at her daughter.

"Anaïs?"

"Mom?"

"What have I been saying?"

Ana sat back on her heels, sighing shakily. "You came in here to tell me you liked the song," she murmured. She tried to smile.

Nathalie rubbed her face and dried her cheeks with the base of her hand.

"I'm starting to wonder," said Anaïs cautiously, keeping her voice low and level as possible, "if the secret I've been asking about is something that I'd be better off not knowing."

Her mother closed her eyes.

"Because it doesn't seem like it's healthy for you to think about."

"I am not healthy either way, Anaïs," Nathalie replied.

Ana's breath hitched, and she bit her lip. She'd managed not to cry so far tonight, but her mother's words pierced deep. "But I want you to be _better_."

"Believe me." Nathalie leaned forward, reaching for Anaïs's hands and clasping them warmly between her own. "I have been thinking about this regardless of you bringing it up, regardless of you cutting your hair to look like you did back then –"

"We need to drop it. You're saying weird things again."

"But they're true. You don't understand, but they are true." Nathalie inhaled and exhaled substantially, like she was trying to breathe through a sharp pain. "I have been thinking about this for the last sixteen and a half years, and the longer I keep it inside, the longer I keep it from you, the more it's going to hurt us. And I can't let it continue to hurt us, and do you know why? Because in some twisted and terrible way, it saved us too." She pressed Ana's hands. "If I go on running, I'm going to let myself forget that."

Anaïs swallowed dryly. "Okay," she whispered.

"I'm calling your brother in the morning," Nathalie said. Slowly, she got to her feet, and Anaïs came up with her. "He and Marinette will come over tomorrow and…and we'll tell you everything."

Ana's heart lurched. She nodded.

Nathalie hugged her, hugged like she clung on for life. "I love you, Anaïs."

"I know, Mom. I love you too."

"We never wanted to hurt you."

"Please, don't say that. I know. I know, Mom."

"There will always be a you I am speaking to," Nathalie murmured, "who will never respond."

Anaïs walked with her mother to her parents' bedroom. Gabriel, who had been lying on some pillows with reading glasses and a tablet, shot to his feet when he saw them enter and immediately started asking if everything was okay. Ana supposed the looks on their faces were transparent as glass.

He agreed to tell her everything tomorrow. Once he'd ushered Nathalie to bed, Gabriel turned to his daughter still in the doorway and told her, "Rest well if you can, my dear, okay?"

She hadn't been able to promise such a thing, but when she'd finally curled up under the covers and shut off her bedside lamp, Anaïs did exactly that, falling hard and fast into dream-filled sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'M gOiNg To MaKe tHiS cUtE
> 
> ~ Me, a dumb person; approximately three weeks ago


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story takes place in the year 2035.

Chapter Three

Adrien and Marinette dropped their children off with Marinette's parents before arriving at the house just past 10 AM the next morning. There was an exchange of hellos and hugs at the door as the pair removed their jackets, shoes, and scarves, but that this was no ordinary Sunday visit would have been palpable to Anaïs even if she wasn't aware of what they had come for. Forlorn expressions and whispers flitted through the foyer while she sat on an ottoman in the living room, watching through the glass doors and stroking Myrtille between the ears. When things got messy, Anaïs doubted the cat would want to stick around. What a lucky creature she was, able to come and go as she pleased without a pair of confused or judgmental eyes to follow her.

Her brother and sister-in-law entered the living room first, both offering faint smiles. They sat beside each other on the sofa, their hands intertwined, and already, Anaïs thought this was beginning to feel familiar. There was this sort of slow and deliberate gathering which mirrored the effect of what had taken place in that same room almost seven years ago on her tenth birthday: facial expressions geared for sympathy, thinly masked discomfort; the lightness of their steps upon the hardwood in an unconscious attempt to create as little sound as possible; and now, as her parents followed in behind them, the closing of doors typically left open, despite the house being otherwise empty, as if the words spoken in the space were meant to be contained there, as if, like wind, they could carry out to other places and disturb things beyond anybody's reach.

Nathalie sat, crossing her feet and curling her fingers around the armrests of the chair. She looked like she may not have slept at all. Her eyes were glassy and lined with purple shadows, but there was an intensity in her expression that seemed to signify eagerness. If this secret had long held her captive, then she appeared ready for the chains to break.

Minutes earlier, Gabriel had left his atelier to answer the door with a thick folder under his arm, which he now set in his lap once he had taken a seat at the corner of the sofa. Ana eyed the item, questioning what something that had presumably been kept in the locked filing drawers with work-related papers had to do with the conversation they were about to have. Because she surely didn't know where else to begin, she was prepared to ask about it, only for Marinette to open her mouth instead.

"Well," she murmured once everybody had settled. "Should I start?"

Nathalie dipped her head, and with a heavy, solemn breath, said, "Go ahead."

"Ana." Clasping her hands together, Marinette angled herself towards her sister-in-law.

Anaïs stiffened, realizing this dreadful truth was moments from being revealed to the light. She nearly propelled herself to her feet, she nearly interrupted Marinette to say she wasn't ready, she nearly fled the room, but something glued her fast to the seat, and then –

"You already know that when you were only a few weeks old, Adrien and I relinquished our superhero identities and returned the miraculous box I'd possessed as guardian to the temple where it belongs."

"In Tibet," Anaïs muttered, hugging Myrtille to her torso.

"Yes, in Tibet." Marinette smiled warmly, and Anaïs was suddenly determined not to look away from her sister-in-law, who was the only person in the room that didn't seem on the verge of falling apart. "When you were a lot younger, we told you we made that choice in order to protect Paris from future danger that would attempt to seek out the miraculous. We told you they were just as capable of attracting evil as they were of protecting from it. We used Hawkmoth as an example. He drew the ladybug and black cat miraculous out of the dark by attacking the city and creating a need for superheroes to begin with. Moreover, being in possession of a miraculous himself made that a possible feat."

Anaïs wanted to ask where this was going. When she was first told this story as a younger child, she had questioned Marinette and Adrien's choice in spite of it being sensible, because it had seemed even more sensible to her that they keep the miraculous around anyway. In her opinion, it was better to be prepared for a disaster than to send the magic halfway across the world where they could no longer reach it, in hopes a villain simply wouldn't strike. But she'd eventually stopped caring enough to think about it.

Marinette added, "But there is a lot more to the story than that. There is a very specific reason we sacrificed the miraculous, a very specific future we had been trying to avoid."

On the opposite end of the sofa, Gabriel opened the folder in his lap. Several sheets of paper spilled out onto the floor, a couple of them blank, others depicting no more than some unremarkable sketches. Anaïs didn't pay much attention to them, she was too focused on the fact that her father's hand was trembling as he leafed through the papers. "I want to show you something, Anaïs," he said.

He pulled out a sheet and showed it to her.

Anaïs stared, impressed but confused by what she was looking at. She reached over and took the piece of paper out of his hand to examine it more closely. "This – this is just a portrait of me."

It was also not a particularly flattering one, but it was detailed and accurate. Anaïs saw herself drawn from head to bust in charcoal, her hair a bit of an unruly mess and her expression twisted into a snarl. Ana wasn't sure she had ever seen herself so angry. Why Gabriel would ever want to draw this, she didn't know.

Her father held up the folder. "Most of these are just journal entries from the nights I couldn't stop dreaming about it," he explained. "It helped to write things down. But sometimes, I needed to draw it out, and the one you're holding now, Anaïs, that's the first piece I ever made. Twelve years ago."

Ana narrowed her eyes at the portrait. That couldn't be. It would be remarkable if her father had been able to so accurately predict what she would look like when she was older. Even though Gabriel had a talent for recreating likenesses from memory, that could only mean this had to have been created recently. Very recently, considering her hair –

Her hair.

Anaïs's fingertips lightly traced the charcoal strands messily composing the figure's dark hair. It was just a little bit shorter than hers was now.

This had to have been made in the last week. Not twelve years ago. Did Gabriel think she was insane?

"Dad…"

"Turn it over," he told her grimly.

She obeyed.

In faded graphite, so faded that she needed to squint, holding the paper merely inches from her gaze, was the shakily-written date, 31/1/2023.

Twelve years ago.

"This is…" Anaïs tossed it onto the coffee table, eyes snapping up to challenge the apprehensive stares of her family. "I don't even know what this is. You expect me to believe you drew that when I was four?" Her voice was crisp and biting but Ana felt like her insides had turned to cotton.

Nathalie bent over and picked another scrap of paper up off the floor. "Would we lie to you about something like this? After all that we've dealt with in anticipation for this conversation?" She spoke feebly, eyes scanning the page she held, before she turned it around. It was another drawing, a simple sketch in pencil of Anaïs with her eyes closed, as if she was sleeping peacefully. "This one is from 2030."

Ana knew her parents wouldn't lie, but she didn't understand. How had Gabriel been able to create these without knowing precisely what she would look like when she was older? She looked over at Adrien and Marinette, as if they could help this make any sense.

"Baby Girl," Adrien said. He hadn't called her that in years, "This isn't going to be an easy thing to wrap your head around. What Marinette mentioned about trying to avoid a certain future, the future she meant was a future where…" He reached for the charcoal rendering she'd thrown away, "Where this was you."

Heaving the cat off of her lap, Anaïs leaped to her feet. Myrtille landed with a startled meow and ran to crouch under Nathalie's legs.

"What are you saying?" Anaïs whispered. "Does this mean you looked into the future, and you saw me, and…" Her breath caught in her throat, "It was bad?"

Bad felt like a vague and laughable understatement. It was horrible. It had to have been _horrible_. Everything Anaïs had witnessed since she cut her hair could only signify that something atrocious had happened. The way her mother seemed afraid of her when she'd seen what Ana had done, the fact they couldn't decide how to tell her the truth after sixteen years spent dwelling on it, Gabriel's unrelenting dreams, Nathalie's emotional outbursts….They couldn't be about to tell her anything but some dreadful narrative, a narrative she maybe didn't want to hear after all.

Marinette said, "We're going to take this slow. We're going to tell you a story, beginning to end. It's going to be hard to hear, but I want you to remember, Anaïs, that while everything we're going to tell you happened, it is in no danger of ever happening again. We made sure of it."

Anaïs looked at each of their faces, catching each flicker of fear, each shadow of doubt, each movement of anguished memory too wide and deep for her to imagine.

She sat back down and folded her hands in her lap. "Okay. Go on."

* * *

**29 December 2017**

Nathalie set her elbows on the toilet seat and leaned her forehead into shaking interlocked hands. A half-pained, half-frustrated moan rattled out from her throat as she stared into the bowl beneath her face, waiting for the worst of this unpleasantness to pass in whichever way it was going to pass (very likely coming out the way it came).

A couple knocks on the open door announced her husband's entry, who she did not even turn to look at. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him reach for the robe hanging on the wall by the shower and slip in on over his pajamas. Usually at this time, he would be on his way downstairs to grab a mug of coffee for the beginning of his day, but he chose to stand there on the other side of the room, watching her for a moment.

"Should I even say Happy Birthday?" he asked. Nathalie could hear the smile in his voice.

Sinking her fingernails into her scalp, she replied, "I wish I was dead."

"She can't even give you a break for a day?" Gabriel chuckled.

"Oh, but now that I say it, she was so kind to let me eat dinner last night."

"Yes, indeed. How considerate," he laughed. In a more serious tone, he asked, "Have you been drinking enough water?"

She nodded. "I haven't been dehydrated for a while."

"So you think it's really getting better?"

"Definitely." Nathalie filled her cheeks with air and blew it out slowly. "But this is still hell."

"Do you need anything?"

Finally, she turned to him, glancing past her left hand to see him standing in the doorway watching her earnestly. Despite her nausea, Nathalie's heart warmed. She couldn't have asked for a more attentive husband. "If this goes on much longer," she murmured, "could you get me some medicine?"

"Oh." Gabriel furrowed his brow. "Does that really help, Nathalie?"

"At any rate, I can stomach it."

Reluctantly, Gabriel sighed, "Okay. Where are the instructions?"

"No problem. I made some myself a couple nights ago. There should be several vials in the bedside drawer."

"Really? I didn't notice you did that." He looked over his shoulder, back into their bedroom.

Nathalie stared back down into the toilet bowl as her stomach flipped. She knew it was irrational and senseless to believe a magical potion designed only to cure magical disease could do anything to curb the harsh side effects of pregnancy, but she'd put a lot of faith in that sapphire concoction over the last few weeks. At the very least it was something with which she could fool herself into thinking she had any sort of control over the remaining months of this unpredictable process.

Gabriel returned to the bathroom with a vial clutched in one hand and laid the other on Nathalie's back as she vomited into the toilet. Once she felt as though she'd emptied her stomach of almost everything she'd eaten the night before, she sighed heavily, flushed it all away and leaned back against Gabriel's legs. He handed her some paper towel.

The child within her stirred, and Nathalie inhaled sharply. It was still a new feeling that she had yet to get used to. She wasn't sure she ever would. "I swear she's trying to kill me," she grumbled breathlessly, to which Gabriel gave a hum of amusement. Nathalie wiped her mouth, and once she'd tossed the towel into the waste bin, she held her palm open for the vial.

"Maybe wait a few minutes," her husband suggested, brushing his fingers soothingly through her hair.

"It's my birthday," she reasoned, with a tone as dry as her sandpapery esophagus felt.

He remarked, "You've never been one to try to use that to your benefit," but after a moment, he gave in to her request.

"That's on you, love. I would have forgotten hadn't you reminded me." She uncapped the vial and swallowed the medicine all at once, letting its bitter flavor overpower the acidic taste in her mouth. A little over a year ago, when this potion had wounds to heal, Nathalie could feel it running through her entire body as though it had entered her blood stream, easing the persistent ache of her bones, softening the pounding of her head, restoring energy bit by bit after going so many months feeling exhausted just to stand. The memory flitted through her head each time she took the medicine now, and it lightened the burden of fear on her soul. Ever so slightly. But a little was better than nothing.

She dropped the empty vial into Gabriel's waiting hand, and he placed it on the bathroom counter. As he helped her to her feet, she told him, "I'm going to brush my teeth, take a shower. I'll be downstairs in about twenty minutes."

He squeezed her hand, kissed the side of her head, "Very well, my dear sorceress."

She laughed.

* * *

"The peacock healing potion was just the beginning. More careful studying of the guardians' grimoire and experimental practice with potion-making allowed for several breakthroughs to be made about what magic was capable of," Marinette said. "There is a lot we still don't know. We don't know why, in _this_ scenario, your mother took to sorcery beyond the one potion she'd learned how to make, but we know she was able to teach her daughter everything she knew, and that her daughter would grow up to become even more knowledgeable, even more innovative, and that she would use her expertise to become a superhero like her brother and sister-in-law before her."

Anaïs listened wordlessly, daring not to interrupt with any of the questions that jumped to her mind, mostly because she didn't know which to ask first. She knew her mother had become gravely sick because of the peacock miraculous's damage. She knew she had been taught to regularly make a healing potion that eventually restored her to health, but she had never thought further about magic than that. She tried to imagine Nathalie, who so intently avoided the topic of her miraculous past, studying and practicing magic to later pass down to _her_. With Ana's head spinning the way it was, it was a nearly impossible task.

"She was called Black Witch," Adrien said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and rubbed his hands together. "She didn't wield a miraculous like us, as far as we know. But she found a way to draw the magic out of the miraculous and make potions or perform spells that replicated their power."

"She was – I was – a superhero," Anaïs stuttered. "Really?"

Adrien and Marinette nodded.

"Okay," Ana exhaled. Everyone paused, letting her process all she had been told so far. Presently, the room was quiet and dry-eyed. The information shared up to that moment was challenging to wrap her head around, cumbersome and uneven, but it wasn't _upsetting_ , and that worried her for what was to come. She asked, "Was that not a good thing?"

"Honestly," Marinette answered, "we don't know. We never saw Black Witch herself."

"I'd like to think she was a good hero. I still think you would be, Anaïs," Adrien murmured.

"But something bad happened one day, when she was about seventeen years old," Marinette went on. "The real reason I sent away the box, Anaïs, was to prevent a certain somebody from getting their hands on a miraculous. One day, though we never had that chance to learn how, a woman would steal the butterfly miraculous. She would be called –"

"Chrysalis," Gabriel growled.

* * *

**6 May 2025**

"Marinette."

Continuing to scan her eyes across the computer screen from where the half-finished suit design was mockingly glowering back at her, the addressed mumbled around the pen in her teeth, "Yeah, hon'?"

"Have you seen this picture Alya and Nino were tagged in?" he asked.

"I haven't been on social media all day," she replied. "Hold on, I just need to finish this, and then I can –"

"Marinette." He held his phone out between her face and the computer, making her recoil in surprise. Adrien wasn't usually one to interrupt her work when she was so focused.

"Hey –!"

Her fingers slipped off of the mouse. Blinking rapidly, Marinette took a second to register the face smiling at her from the display: tanned skin, bobbed auburn hair, and a pair of olive green eyes squinting in the sun. Flanked by two of her best friends holding cups of coffee up to the camera, was a woman Marinette hadn't expected to ever hear from again.

"Whoa."

Lila Rossi looked different, in a very subtle but substantial way that altered her otherwise immediately recognizable face. There was something plainly uncharacteristic adorning her expression, something Marinette realized a moment later might have been a sort of raw and careless authenticity, a pure mindless joy, utterly unconscious of itself and unconcerned with the tendency of genuine emotion to often make one appear just a little less flattering than they would in a moment of cool control – essentially, she looked happy and uncalculated, and thus, nothing really like Lila Rossi.

 _Visited some old friends alyacesaire and djnino today in Paris_ , read the caption.

"She's in Paris?"

"She hasn't been back here in almost seven years, I think," Adrien said.

Marinette pressed her fingertips to her lips. That long ago, Lila had left France with her mother to receive psychiatric treatment in her home country, and following that, Marinette had had no means of finding out if it had been of any help, especially given the magical origin of some of the problems she faced. Softly, she pointed out, "She seems well."

Adrien pulled back the phone and brushed the hair off of his forehead. "I looked at her page too. Her first post was only a couple months ago. As far as I can tell, she's been completely off the grid before then."

Thoughtfully, Marinette raised her eyes up to her husband's face. "That's good."

"Seems so."

She folded her arms tightly across her chest, as if she was cold. "Why does that make me feel so uneasy?"

"Because she's Lila. Always will be. But I texted Nino when I saw this to ask him about it," Adrien explained. "She was only here for a few days and she's flying back to Italy tomorrow. He said she's…different. Mellower. Less talkative. Apparently she doesn't remember a lot from when we were teenagers."

"Really?"

"I suppose that memory-erasure spell had some serious permanent effects," he said grimly. Pulling up a chair, he added, "But this had me thinking about how much had changed. It only hit me when I saw this photo. Remember Timetagger? That time-traveling akuma from the future who attacked when we were fourteen?"

Marinette was taken aback, less so by the mention of the akuma than by the association that had leaped to her mind upon his mention – Bunnyx, another name she hadn't heard in years, but it was a name she'd thought about frequently. The rabbit superhero she'd come face to face with multiple times, who'd helped her on occasions in which she wouldn't have been able to succeed by herself, was a woman who by her choices was erased from existence completely. Marinette knew she and the Agrestes had preserved a lot, but that didn't come without its own sacrifices.

"Yeah," she breathed.

"I think back then I'd just assumed he came from the same Hawkmoth, but he'd been Chrysalis's all along," Adrien went on, "And we'll never face Chrysalis."

"So there will never be a Timetagger."

"It's been ten years," Adrien murmured, eyes looking into the distance, "since that day. All those villains Bunnyx said we would face, we never faced."

"The future has always been ours to mold."

"I guess what I'm saying is…" Adrien smiled gently, and a sigh of relief cascaded out of his lungs, like weight rolling off his body with the ease of water. "This is the first time I've ever felt decidedly safe. From all of it. From Chrysalis, from losing Dad, from…Ana…"

Marinette reached forward and cupped his jaw. "Oh, Adrien."

He closed his eyes, leaning his head into her hand. "Yeah, it...it's nice."

* * *

Anaïs gazed at her father, dumbstruck.

"I'm sorry…" she began, holding up an index finger. "Did I – did I hear –?"

In the armchair, Nathalie dropped her face into her hands, having already thrown her glasses onto the coffee table on top of several sheets of paper. Gabriel rubbed her shoulder comfortingly, solemnly holding Ana's dismayed stare. He did not say anything, his lips pursed, his jaw screwed shut.

"I don't understand." She turned to her brother. "You're trying to tell me that some – some girl you went to school with hated you and – and hated Dad so much that she –"

"We're not wasting any more time talking about Chrysalis and her motives," Marinette interrupted.

"No, what do you mean? She _killed_ him?" Anaïs exclaimed. She was on her feet and began to pace the length of the living room. "How did she – you said she was a super villain for ten years and – how did she win? How is that possible? You must've had all the other miraculous at your disposal. What could have she possibly done with Ladybug and Chat Noir and – and _Black Witch_ – what kind of akuma –?"

"Anaïs," Adrien cut in. "I know this is a lot to take in. But it's not going to get any easier, so can we please slow down?"

"I don't understand. You guys told me Dad sent out hundreds of akumas – sometimes multiple at once – and he never got his hands on the miraculous. How did this Chrysalis manage to – I don't believe it."

Bitterly, Nathalie laughed.

"Mom," Anaïs said. Recalling her mother's words to her the night before, she paused in the middle of the room and quieted her wringing hands. "I didn't mean…"

"Do you want to know, Anaïs, how Chrysalis won?" Gabriel asked, squeezing his wife's shoulder.

Knowing she would likely regret it, Anaïs dipped her chin.

The answer was worse than she imagined.

"She akumatized you."

* * *

**17 June 2018**

"I don't want you to blame yourself."

Standing above him, Nathalie shifted her weight from foot to foot, whisking her fingers through his damp gray hair. The baby in his arms was fast asleep. Her feet and hands twitched periodically as he softly rocked her against his heart.

"I know it's the easiest thing to do, and I'd be lying if I said I don't do it too," she went on.

"Nathalie, that's the problem."

"It's hard, love. I wouldn't ask you to tell me what happened if I didn't know the reason you are keeping it from me." She draped his arms around him.

Gabriel wondered if the thump of his pulse could stir his daughter awake. He leaned into Nathalie's embrace, eyes on the window.

Then she said, "I know you. I know you are holding this inside so you can let yourself think you're at fault. Because I won't let you think that, right?"

"Nathalie…" He turned his head, kissed her on the collarbone. He wished she hadn't asked him to begin with. He would never have had the heart to lie to her, to answer _no_ when she wondered, _Did she tell you what happened? Did she tell you how they lost? This has been eating me alive…_

He'd told her, _Yes_.

She'd asked him, _How?_

And now…

"My dear." Gabriel pulled away to look his wife in the face. Locking eyes with him, she took a seat on the bed at his side. He stroked the baby's hair, and Anaïs turned her head against his chest, releasing a little sleepy whine. "Chrysalis akumatized her."

Nathalie flinched, her soft expression twisting in agony the way he knew it would. "She –"

"Chrysalis was able to get the miraculous because she akumatized Anaïs," Gabriel explained. He tried to keep the emotion out of his voice. "And Ana…Ana said she wished we'd never told her anything. Chrysalis used her because she knew everything about Ladybug and Chat Noir and – and me."

Nathalie squeezed her eyes shut, heaving a shuddering breath. "Oh…"

"She caught her on a vulnerable day. She had the patience to wait years for the right opportunity." Gabriel thought the baby felt strangely heavy in his arm, and it was probably because he felt as though his limbs were turning to honey. "Anaïs thought it was all her fault. She would have…preferred not to exist at all."

His wife reached for one of the baby's hands, fitting an index finger within her slack grip. "Gabriel."

"It's alright," he whispered.

"I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to apologize for."

"I know. I just can't imagine how hard that must have been for you to hear. I can't imagine how much that must have –" her voice cracked "–how much that must have weighed on her."

Gabriel pressed another kiss to her cheek.

That was all that was said on the subject.

"The poor thing."

Because he would never have dared to tell Nathalie _the reason_ Anaïs had been akumatized.

_Mom was right, and if I'd just listened to her..._

" _I wish that we could erase everything and start over again."_

_She was right to think that._

_Chrysalis akumatized me that night._

Gabriel let Nathalie take the baby from his arms, and he watched her leave the room to return her to the crib in the nursery.

If Nathalie found out Anaïs had been akumatized over something _she_ had said, she would have no forgiveness for herself. Gabriel knew she carried the weight of every sin on her back, and whatever burden he could spare her, he would spare her.

* * *

Had Anaïs slammed the glass down any harder, she might have shattered it. Instead, a high-pitched ring scraped through the kitchen, very likely making its way through the rest of the house as well, as soon as she had choked down every drop of water she'd filled to the rim in a desperate attempt to ease the unbearable dryness of her throat.

Much more gently now, Ana moved the glass from the countertop to the sink. It was an overcast morning, and as she glared out the window towards the back garden, catching the breath she had lost while trying to drink as quickly as possible, an old but very familiar envy started to crawl up her body like constricting vines: a bitter awareness of the utter normalcy the rest of the city got to enjoy, while she was feeling that undervalued quality being slowly and painfully ripped out of her grip. Anaïs had felt it when she found out that her parents used to be supervillains, and she'd felt it strongly when she got to know just how intensely her family was haunted by the fact, but now she was getting to know another ghost, and this feeling may not be so easy to ignore any longer.

They were taking a break. Anaïs had needed a drink and everybody else was already exhausted by the task of sharing this troubling story. She'd left them all in the living room for a moment of peace, if even a small increment of such was achievable at a time like this, but now she wondered if it was smart to remove herself, because now she didn't want to go back. She didn't want to hear the rest of this story, of which, she worried, she was the villain.

Her father was…

Her father would've been…

(She didn't know how to think of it.)

And it was because of her…

Anaïs straightened as she heard somebody else enter the kitchen behind her. A set of light footsteps sounded on the hardwood before a hand reached and took her softly by the shoulder.

"Hey," Marinette said, glancing up with sympathetic blue eyes. "We heard a noise."

"I dropped a glass. It's fine," Ana replied shortly, gesturing to the intact item sitting alone in the sink.

"Yes, but I also came in to ask how you're doing."

"Well, how do you think?" She glanced down at her sister-in-law with a raised eyebrow, shrugging off her hand.

"I know. It's a lot to take in."

"It's more than a lot, it's terrible, and I suppose it's only going to get worse from here?" Anaïs stepped away from the sink, leaning on the island counter in the center of the kitchen. She cursed as her elbow knocked the bowl of fruit sitting too close to the edge.

Marinette approached again and moved the bowl out of the way. "I won't lie to you. It is only going to get harder to listen to."

"Of course," grumbled Anaïs.

"I wish that wasn't the case, but I suppose if it was easy, you would have known a long time ago," Marinette said.

"Is there any way to back down now?"

"I don't think that's a good idea, but you can take your time here." Marinette dipped her head reassuringly. "Whenever you are ready to come back."

"I'm surprised anyone wants to continue."

"I think they all want to put this behind them."

"Since things only get grimmer from here, I wonder if that's even possible."

Marinette sighed, folding her arms. "The only things you can't heal from," she replied, eyes darkening, "are the things that kill you. And we're all still here. We all plan to heal. None of us are going anywhere." When Anaïs didn't respond to this, lowering her gaze to the floor instead, Marinette started padding towards the doorway. "Listen, we all love you, Big Little Sis, and we will take this at your pace, alright? Come back when you're willing to hear more. Oh, also –" Marinette waved a hand to draw Ana's gaze, and then pointed at the top of her head to signify the messy bun holding Ana's black hair in place. "Adrien showed me the picture of your haircut. It's cute."

Anaïs offered a little smile. "Am I meant to thank you? Everyone else has mixed to negative feelings."

"What, as if they didn't expect you to look like they've already seen you to look like? Ah, but we haven't gotten to that part of the story yet." She winked. Anaïs was grateful that there was somebody involved in this who could manage to make a little lightness out of it. For everyone else, the last half hour had been a purely agonizing experience.

"Can I ask you something, Marinette?"

She beamed. "Of course. Anything, Ana."

"I'm asking you because I feel like you could give me the most objective answer," Anaïs prefaced. The older woman nodded, her expression serious and open. "Does – does my family resent me for being the reason my dad died? Is that why they – they act so weird around me sometimes?"

Marinette pressed her lips, eyes gleaming with sorrow. "Oh, sweetheart, no. That's not it. They'd never even witnessed it themselves, but more importantly," she pressed a hand to her heart, "You are the light of their lives. If only you could hear the way I've heard them talk about you from the moment you were born. They've never wanted anything but the best and the brightest for you. Anaïs, you are their world."

Attempting to stifle the tears that had come to her eyes, Ana held her breath and sank her teeth into her lip, nodding. "Okay."

Marinette smiled and left the room.


	4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four

**31 January 2023**

It was 2:42 in the morning when he jerked awake, pushing himself upright and gasping for breath.

"Ana –!"

The moon glared through the window like a wide cold eye piercing into the side of his head. Gabriel shielded his face with his hands to block out the light and stared into the space before him. The darkness yielded none of the shapes and shadows that had leaped at him from behind his sealed eyelids moments earlier, that explosion of silver, that familiar visage screwed with rage and pain, those watery blue-gray eyes lancing through the darkness to sink deep into his soul. As it should have been, the room was empty of the materialization of his most harrowing memories.

Heart hammering, Gabriel drank in a deep breath. He rubbed his quivering hands together before reaching for his glasses on the bedside table and slipping them on.

Nathalie's faint sigh drew his eyes her direction. He watched her turn from her side to her back to reveal her placid expression. She was still asleep. Good. She'd been in high spirits lately. The last thing he wanted to do was mar that with the spontaneous re-emergence of his own troubles.

So as not to disturb her, Gabriel got slowly out of bed and exited the room, leaving the door ajar by a sliver. The nightlight plugged into the wall in the hallway revealed the half-open door of his daughter's bedroom further down, and if he poked his head inside, he would see her curled under layers of fluffy blankets and tangled up in her own long dark hair that she refused to let him braid before bed. But he didn't look. There was some stupid and irrational thought in his head that if he dared to peek he would come face to face with somebody else.

Instead, Gabriel traveled downstairs to his atelier and ripped a sheet of paper from the sketchpad sitting on his desk. He scrambled for a pencil, knocking a photo frame over in the process, and started to write, with numbers that wavered with his unsteady grip, 31/1/2023.

But he paused there, because he realized in that moment that he didn't know how to put into words what he had seen.

He'd had nightmares before that were easier to describe, nightmares in which he could remember things that had been said or screamed or whispered to him through the dark, things he had seen as vividly as though he was experiencing them all over again, yanked by the collar back through time to take the place of a self who wouldn't know how much this would haunt him, who couldn't even wonder what later nights held in waiting, too wrapped up in the horror of the moment.

Tonight, there was only one image on his mind: the pale and anguished expression, cheeks streaked with tears, chopped black hair messily framing the burning eyes of his little girl.

The one who didn't exist anymore. The one who died by his sword and then faded away, only to burst back to life the dead of sleep.

The pencil dropped out of his hand. Gabriel trembled from head to toe as if he was freezing cold.

 _Please_.

He wanted to wring her out of his head. He wanted to forget her face so he didn't have to see it on his daughter when she got older, but there was no way to forget. He knew it all too well, so well, in fact, that he could draw it.

She looked almost exactly like her mother. They had pretty much identical noses. Her jawline was perhaps a little squarer, just a touch, and her eyebrows a little thicker, but not by much. And her eyes, they were not shaped exactly like Nathalie's, and not quite like his, but somewhere in between, yet when he looked into their shiny tearful surfaces, he'd _seen_ himself so clearly. He didn't know if it was the color or if it was the soul behind them, but even now, when he glanced at his daughter, sometimes it was like looking in a mirror. Nathalie had once told him they had the same smile. Maybe they had the same scowl as well.

There would be no way to escape the face in his head. He would only see clearer and clearer over time. But somehow, he needed to work it out of himself for long enough to survive the rest of the night.

Gabriel turned over the sheet of paper. Still shaking, he dug through one of the desk drawers looking for pieces of charcoal.

Then, after taking a series of long, deep breaths to steady his hand, he pressed the tip of the utensil to the center of the page and started drawing.

* * *

"You used magic to disguise yourself."

Anaïs chewed on her thumbnail, listening intently. Her attention was on her father who had begun telling this stretch of the story, who, she learned, was the first person to ever come face to face with her as an adult. She tried to break his miraculous with a cataclysm potion and failed.

"We had no idea who you were. None of us had guessed you'd come from anywhere other than the present."

She was trying to understand what he was telling her, but her mind was whirling with all of the information she was absorbing at once. They might have all been able to comprehend the mechanics of time travel, but she didn't even know where to begin. Teeth nibbling at the tip of her thumb, breaking a thin layer of skin, she struggled to reconcile her own ignorant mind with that of the woman – of the equally real version of herself – who'd known so much, who'd accomplished so much, who'd had the heart to change reality. And instead of understanding, she only felt her own head violated by a presence she didn't even know had been there first.

If that was even how it worked. She didn't get it. All she knew is that it felt wrong.

Gabriel told her about the several days he and the rest of her family had struggled against the trio of villains she'd led as a way to distract them from her real goal. He told her about the morning she'd come dangerously close to succeeding, when she'd taken Ladybug's earrings to use in place of the ones Chrysalis had destroyed seventeen years in the future. He told her about the fights and the hours of interrogation and the creation of a potion that led up to her identity finally being revealed to them.

"I remember how it felt when we broke the spell of your disguise."

Anaïs's eyes flicked to Nathalie. Her mother stared down at the floor as she spoke, and one hand was positioned above her heart, rubbing a small circle repeatedly into the fabric of her sweater.

"I can still…feel it…" Trailing off, her eyes fell closed, and she leaned back in the chair. She appeared drained of energy.

"You were devastated," Gabriel said. He took Nathalie's hand away from her chest and squeezed her fingers.

"You could tell who I was?" Ana murmured.

"After a few seconds, it sank in," answered her father. "You looked too much like us. When I realized, I couldn't unsee it."

"So, my hair." Anaïs looked back at the charcoal drawing on the coffee table.

"You told us why you had come," Gabriel went on, "Albeit, not painlessly."

"You were really upset," Adrien reinforced. "You'd never wanted to hurt us or get us involved. If you'd had your way, none of us would have even known what you'd done, but you would have succeeded at destroying the butterfly miraculous."

Marinette added, "You were trying to protect us from the truth, and you – you'd made a promise – to me. To be careful."

"What?" Ana said, confused.

"This is where it gets even more difficult to explain. We only know what you had told us. We weren't able to look into the future ourselves." Gabriel glanced at his wife. Nathalie's fingers hung limply in his grasp and her head was turned away from everybody else in the room. "Love?" he called gently. "How are you?"

"Mom," whispered Anaïs.

Her response was a hardly audible "Go on."

* * *

**A rainy October night**

"Can you feel it too?"

She slid her hand up his chest, fingertips lightly brushing the narrow gap between his collarbones. She had no reason to expect his skin to be burning hot in that place, but when she felt only smooth coolness beneath her touch, she flinched.

"My dear, what do you mean?" he wondered, voice thick with sleep. Taking her hand, he brought it up to his lips and peppered her fingers with small kisses.

"I still, I still feel it," she replied. She was out of breath. There was a broad and heavy weight in her chest, and it started to extend throughout her whole body, as if the blood was slowly hardening in her veins. She felt like she was turning to stone from the inside out.

"Whoa," he said. Now, he seemed to notice something was wrong. "Love, what's going on?"

"Do you remember?" She pulled back her hand and stretched it across her chest, trying to soothe the slow ache originating there, right above her heart. "Do you remember how she felt?"

"Who?" he murmured, then a moment passed and he understood. "Oh, Nathalie. It's okay. Breathe."

She gasped for air, fingers pulling at her shirt as if trying to pluck something away from the fabric, something that hadn't been pinned there in a very long time. But she could still _feel_ , so strongly, this stony burning grief filling up all the space inside her.

"I remember," he told her. After tossing their bedsheets away to free up some room, he helped her sit upright. "I remember, darling."

"It's everywhere," she rasped.

"You're not wearing the peacock miraculous. It's only a memory."

"I can't…" She pinched and prodded her chest. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't find it. She couldn't throw away the pain. She needed it to melt off her body the way Mayura used to melt away, so she didn't have to feel everything Mayura felt anymore.

"Nathalie, Anaïs is in her room. She's fine. Perfectly fine. She's safe, and she doesn't know that feeling. Look at me, love," he said. When she glanced up, she could barely see the gleam of his eyes through the dark. He took a series of deep breaths through his nose, and she started to mimic him.

It was like being buried alive. She wished she had never sensed her daughter's pain. She wished she had never known how it felt for her husband to die.

"Listen," he whispered, words cascading with his breath, "listen to the rain,"

Gentle against the windows. Steady. Light. She continued her slow pattern of inhale and exhale, and gradually, the hand on her chest went still.

* * *

It had taken a while, but Anaïs finally felt like she was going to throw up.

In her hands, she held another one of her father's drawings. This one had been sketched in blue ballpoint pen and depicted her wearing the peacock miraculous. He'd pulled it from the folder after spending several minutes trying to explain the agonizing confrontation that had occurred once her identity had been revealed to them: dodging questions and tears and violent outbursts; memory loss potions and revenge and – and – she _killed_ Chrysalis. She killed Chrysalis and then went back and time and _used_ her before she was ever Chrysalis, beat her and scrambled her mind beyond repair and tried to kill her _again_ and didn't seem one bit to regret it. And they'd found that out only after she called her own mother a coward and disregarded the life she would sacrifice to bring her father back from the dead, even if it was the life of somebody else she loved. And –

"Oh, God," Anaïs groaned, staring into her own blue-inked face with piercing eyes that glared right back at her. She felt like she was looking at a monster.

Adrien had risen from the couch and crouched beside the ottoman where she sat. He grasped her forearm delicately. "Listen, Baby Girl, don't conflate this version of yourself with who you are now. The two of you are not the same person."

"But – but she – I –"

"She told us, she worked herself for three years after Dad was murdered to try and find a way to get him back. She was used as a tool in her father's death. She had no control. She was trying to get it back. All that time, and she never found a way to grieve. Her pain consumed her."

"But that doesn't – that –"

"Anaïs," Marinette said softly. "Your brother is right. She was a different person. She had completely different experiences."

Eyes fixed on the sketch, her family's reassurance failed to alleviate any of the horror that sickened her now. This had always been a story about her, hadn't it? Wasn't that what made it so dreadful?

The cat was bristling and warbled to be let out of the room. Adrien released his sister and went to open the door for her, shutting it promptly once again as soon as she had passed out into the foyer. The interruption offered a few seconds of abatement of the pressure weighing in from all directions, but the difference was so miniscule that Anaïs hardly noticed. Each pulse of her heart was a sharp pain.

She wouldn't dare raise her gaze to look at her parents. She could only see their feet in her peripheral vision, and she dreaded to imagine how the rest of them appeared. As far as she knew, Gabriel hadn't released the hand of his wife, who had been completely silent through this stretch of the story, apart from a few brisk breaths.

_You're good parents. You and Dad. I mean it._

But Anaïs could hear her mother's voice in her head, dizzied by the narrative unfolding on top of the words Nathalie had spoken last night.

_It's strange to hear her say that._

"Anaïs, it's okay, you can hand me the drawing," she heard her father murmur after the moment of silence had elapsed. "I know we've told you a lot. I thought it might be helpful to have something to help you visualize with, but if it's too much…"

She leaned forward to place the sheet of paper face down on the coffee table, eyes briefly trailing over the date on the back, 14/8/2028. "So, none of you listened to me, because I'd completely lost my mind."

"Ana…"

"And then I took the peacock miraculous and ran away." She placed a hand on her chest, over the place her father had drawn the brooch, pinned crookedly under her collarbone. Voice dripping with venom, she asked, "What happened next?"

* * *

**25 April 2030**

"You're kidding."

"Absolutely not."

"I don't believe you."

"I have the text right here."

"This is a joke."

"You think my father jokes?"

"Give him more credit. Either that, or he's gone mad."

Marinette turned off the sink and grabbed a dish towel to wipe her hands with before looking at Adrien's phone. Her mouth dropped open in incredulous delight.

"So, he's gone mad?"

On the screen is a message from Gabriel reading, _This is your sister's birthday present_ , and below it, a picture of a fluffy gray kitten, mid-mew by the fact its mouth was open to reveal cute little teeth.

"I'd say so," Adrien said, giving a shrug.

Marinette laughed and leaned against the countertop, putting a hand on her hip. "Well, if it had been up to me, this would have happened a long time ago."

"My father losing his mind?"

"No, silly, your sister getting a cat. She's only wanted one since she could talk."

"Remember how she used to whisper in our ears to get her one for Christmas in secret?"

"Used to? I'm fairly sure she'd done that just this last holiday."

"I came close to caving on more than one occasion," Adrien replied. "When the kids find out about this, do you think they'll want a cat too?"

"If they want one as badly as Ana has wanted one, we might just have to adopt," said Marinette. She turned back to sink and continued rinsing the dishes, squeezing some extra water out of her sponge. Her face was still alight with amazement. "Geez, I cannot believe your father gave in. After how many years of 'no pets allowed?'"

Adrien pocketed his phone and set a hand on his chin, "Hm, twelve plus – let's see, I was five years old when I first asked for a puppy – twelve, so twenty-four? Nearly a quarter of a century of disappointment. To be fair, my mother wasn't one for animals in the house either."

"Ay, but your father is one of the most stubborn people I've ever met," Marinette said.

Adrien took the plates as she handed them to him and placed them in the dishwasher. "It seems the immovable object Gabriel Agreste has met the unstoppable force, Anaïs Agreste. Oh man, I can't wait to see the look on her face on the 27th when he hands that kitten over."

"Her power," Marinette remarked, "Unmatched."

Adrien paused, his grip around a dish stiffening for a moment. "Well," he huffed, and by only that syllable, Marinette seemed able to pick up on the way his tone had quickly darkened. Her blue gaze darted over to him, smile freezing on her face. "We already knew she was going to be stubborn too."

His wife blinked and pursed her lips. "Oh –" she inhaled. "Yeah, I guess we did."

"All those years she's been told no, and she must have never stopped asking," Adrien went on. "It makes a lot of sense, now."

"She's very strong-willed," Marinette murmured.

"Remarkably so."

"That can be a good thing, remember."

"I know. I hope it will _only_ be a good thing for her." Adrien's heart sank. He set the plate in the dishwasher and sighed, glancing to the other side of the room, where there hung a photograph of himself, Marinette, and a seven-year-old Ana dressed in a little blush pink suit at their wedding reception. "I would hate to imagine in what ways it can go wrong."

"We've already seen the worst of it," his wife reminded him.

"Yeah, we have."

"Oh, Kitty," she soothed. "Try not to worry about her. Everything is going to be fine. You know that."

"Of course, I do." In that image of his sister so young a child, with her hair professionally styled and her face beaming with a wide grin, he could still see the shadow of something that wasn't meant to be, something still holding the power to tangle up his insides and wring the conviction and peace out of them. "It's just easy to forget sometimes."

"That's why I'm here to remind you," Marinette said.

Smiling, he told her, "Thank you, my Lady."

* * *

Anaïs felt like she had been slammed into a brick wall.

The room tilted for a moment, though it may have only been the effect of her swaying back and forth on her seat, destabilized by the force of the words she'd just heard quoted back from her father's mouth. The air had been knocked out of her lungs, and she could only gain it back in quick and shallow breaths that only made her feel dizzier.

"No…no…no," she whispered, shaking her head at them. She couldn't even really make out the looks on their faces. They all blended together in front of her, to the point that she was nauseated by the sight. Anaïs covered her face with her hands and squeezed her eyes shut, inviting more darkness than her eyelids could ultimately provide. She wanted to float away.

 _You shouldn't be forced to make a choice this horrible, just to fix this mess I caused by existing_.

"Please, please no," Ana cried. "I didn't do that. I wouldn't do that."

She'd blamed herself for everything. For all of her family's pain, and when they wouldn't let her fix it with magic, she thought the only solution was –

Was to –

"Anaïs, Baby Girl –"

" _I wouldn't do that_!" she snapped. She'd launched herself to her feet, forgetting how dazed she felt as the shock in her system was replaced with fierce denial, which blazed through her bloodstream like liquid fire. "I wouldn't! There is no world, no – no – where I could – where I –"

"You didn't," Marinette reminded her. "You're not the same person, Anaïs."

"You don't believe that," she retorted. "You can't decide whether to use 'you' or 'she'. _You_ don't know if she's a different person!"

"Anaïs, please, this is hard to hear, we know," Adrien said, "but let's be as calm as we can about this."

She didn't want to be calm. She wanted to scream and to cry. Her heart raced madly and felt like it was going to leap out of her chest. "How?" she demanded.

"Start with some deep breaths," Adrien told her gently.

She couldn't look at them. Anaïs spun around and faced the wall, while a hand flew up to clutch her own throat.

She almost –

It was a defensive instinct, because she could picture it so clearly, but it seemed her mind was split in two, for she imagined herself two ways: victim and killer. Helpless and small and on the precipice of darkness. Hopeless and violent and ready to bring it all to an end. She could feel both because she was both now, just as she was both then in two different bodies, presently converging into one nearly seventeen years later.

 _You shouldn't have to bear the burden of my mistakes_.

All this time, all this suffering, all those moments where she was someone other than the girl they raised, when the daughter they saw was the one who broke them apart before they could even imagine what she was capable of. Anaïs hiccupped through a spring of tears. She covered the wound in her throat that never had the chance to exist, that never got to mark the end of this cycle she felt she had been thrust into. It was a cycle of pain and tragedy and grief, and she was there at the center of it.

She _hated_ herself. She hated the version of herself who burst into her family's life and destroyed them, who had been too blind and angry to see that everything she tried to fix things only broke them further, broke them so deeply that it reached through time to break _her_ all over again.

And this wasn't even the end of the story.

"How did you stop me?" she asked. The rest of the room had fallen completely silent, and nobody rushed to answer her question in the several seconds that elapsed before she asked again, "How did you stop me from - from doing that to myself?"

"Anaïs, sit back down," Gabriel said. His voice was choked, and for the first time in her sixteen years and ten months of life, Ana might have been hearing her father cry.

"What did it take?" She didn't sit down. She didn't turn around. She kept her eyes on the wall and growled her questions through clenched teeth, not bothering to wipe the tears rolling down her burning cheeks. "I'm still here somehow, which means you did something. You must have changed my mind somehow, though I – I can't even imagine how you could get through to somebody so far gone."

" _We didn't_."

Ana winced. The voice that answered her was frigid and hard as ice, and even though she couldn't see her, Anaïs could feel her mother's eyes pointed into her back, piercing cold. It was her words which compelled her to glance over her shoulder, to meet the wide and electric gaze glaring her way, bright and icy as a pair of moons.

"I wish we did. I wish we'd been able. So much power in our hands, but none of us could work a miracle. There wasn't a voice you would listen to that wasn't your own."

The way that Nathalie was looking at her, was speaking to her, it reminded Anaïs of the previous night, when her mother's memories had rushed like a storm to consume the present in its turmoil. But this time, Ana knew who it was Nathalie was talking to. And she wanted to listen.

"I don't remember," Nathalie went on, putting her head in a hand. "I don't remember if we ever asked you what it would take. I don't know if there would have been a point. You'd decided. You saw how our lives had crumbled down after your father died, and that was the worst thing you could imagine happening. You didn't think there was any way for it to hurt more but you _made_ it hurt."

"Nathalie," said Gabriel, taking his wife's shoulder, but Nathalie shrugged him off. "Please, don't blame Anaïs."

"You almost broke my nose. You almost killed my baby."

Ana's stomach dropped.

Gabriel's face was white with alarm when he said, "We're taking another break."

"Let her speak," Anaïs whispered breathlessly, "I want to know what I did to her."

" _You_ didn't do anything," Adrien insisted.

"You could have backed down," continued Nathalie, with her hands balled into fists perched on the arms of the chair. "I had hope for a split second that you would, that when you saw yourself in that crib, you'd realize you had lost your way, but no. I was stupid. Do you know how it feels to hear your child beg you to let them end it, to know they think you cruel for trying to stop them?"

"That's enough," said Adrien sternly.

"Marinette got us out of there, though, away from the baby –"

"Nathalie –"

"You fought tooth and nail. You created a sentimonster strong enough to rip into the earth and you unleashed it against us. All of that, and we didn't stop pleading with you to give it up. We never stopped. We wanted to help you. We wanted to fix this. You didn't trust us." Nathalie stood up when Gabriel tried to grab her again. Her words were shivering leaves in the wind, the ice in her eyes melting into tears. "No matter what we said, you didn't trust us. Nothing was enough for you. Why?"

Gabriel, rising to his feet, took his wife by the arms and forced her to look at him. It was like trying to shift stone. "It's _okay_ , Nathalie," he told her. "Please, look at me."

Marinette reached and took Adrien's hand, squeezed it as they watched silently.

"Don't blame our daughter," Gabriel pleaded. "Anaïs, _our_ Anaïs, she isn't responsible for any of this."

Nathalie's scowl softened, and she pulled her eyes away from Ana at last, her focus landing slowly on her husband, who held her so tightly, his knuckles were white. She shook her head, "No," she murmured, "not her. What did I do?"

"You?" Gabriel said. "What do you…?"

"What kind of mother was, for you not to trust me?" Nathalie demanded, turning back to Anaïs. "What kind of wife was I to the father you lost that you wouldn't let me help you?"

"Oh, Nathalie." Gabriel pulled her close, setting his chin on the top of her head.

"Mom," Adrien called. He almost never referred to her this way; Anaïs had only heard him say it once before, on his wedding day. "Don't blame yourself either. You can't be upset with a version of you that doesn't exist."

"This is not the same life that any of us had lived," Marinette added. "We're all going to be fine."

"I am not fine," Nathalie responded, her voice muffled against her husband's shoulder. She clung to him, taking a deep breath.

Anaïs wasn't brave enough to speak. And if she had been, she wouldn't have known what to say. All the words in her head had been smothered away, fine as ash slipping through her fingers.

"That's okay," replied Marinette hollowly.

Nathalie withered, dropping onto the sofa where Gabriel had previously been. He sat on the coffee table across from her, watching with troubled gray eyes as she dried her tears with the sleeves of her sweater. "I am not as strong as I used to be," she said. "A long time ago, I had nothing to lose, now I can't stand the thought of watching anything fall apart. I didn't know how painful loss could be." She glanced up at Anaïs. "Until you showed me the worst of it."

"My love, enough," Gabriel muttered.

But Ana nodded at him, very slightly. Her mother needed to speak, she needed to speak to _her_ , the one who had caused all this pain and disappeared into time, and she needed to be listened to.

"Everything that you put us through, all the fear of our identities being revealed to a world that hated us, all the screaming and the bloodshed, and the – the destroying yourself, it was all just a means to an end for you. I know what that's like. I know how that feels, that kind of desperation. I must have never taught you how little it is worth." Nathalie rubbed her hands together as if they were cold. "Because even if it was never about the means, the end was so terrible anyway. If you had gotten what you wanted there would have been nothing left but pain and death and punishment for all the things I'd worked so hard to believe I didn't deserve. We made it out by the skin of our teeth, Anaïs, feeling only a fraction of the pain we could have felt, but it still hurt so deeply."

"Yes," Ana whispered. Her voice shook, hardly audible. "I see that. I'm sorry."

"The worst part," Nathalie closed her eyes, inhaling a sharp breath through her nose, "The worst part is that there's nowhere to look for answers. There's nothing to point at to say, 'that is where it all began', because it is all gone. Wiped from this earth, and it will never come back."

"But that's good, isn't it?" her daughter asked gently.

Nathalie's expression flickered. "Y-yes. It's good."

"It doesn't change the fact it happened, though, huh?"

"No." Nathalie reached forward, linking her fingers with Gabriel's, who stared earnestly at her as she spoke, "That is what I mean, that the only place it lives is in our heads, memories of something that will never happen, and that's – that's hard to accept. It feels like I'm fighting for my life against something that stopped killing me long ago, so long ago that the weapons are nowhere to be found. But I can still feel them."

Adrien moved towards her and set a hand on her shoulder. "You're not alone, Mom."

"I know," she breathed. "You feel it too."

Anaïs didn't want to say, but she thought she had already begun to feel the edges of those blades pressed up against her, in the way her anger simmered for the woman she could have been, the woman she would never be. There was no way to aim her rage that felt like the right direction, and so it burned, hot and painful and with nowhere to go but deeper.

"Mom," she said instead, taking a few steps towards them all from where she had been standing frozen on the other side of the room, "I wish I had listened to you."

Nathalie blinked in surprise. "Ana…?"

"I wish I'd listened. And I know I'm not the Ana you wish could tell you that, but maybe it just means something to hear it on her voice."

Nathalie released her husband's hand and stood up to pull Anaïs into a hug. Biting her lip, Ana tried to hold back her tears as she returned the embrace and told her mom she loved her.

"I love you too, my Ana. So much. If only you knew."

Gabriel stood, and he joined their hug, followed by Adrien and Marinette. They all stood there by the couch for a minute or so, tangled in each other's arms, exhaling all their weariness in warm quivering breaths. It was barely midday, but Ana could fall asleep for a thousand years to let the weight of the last hour melt off of her.

But it wasn't quite over yet. When they all pulled away, stepping back to wipe their eyes and return to their seats, Anaïs grabbed her mother's hand and pressed once, almost as a warning for the question she was about to ask.

"But because she didn't listen to you, that means you stopped her some other way," she murmured.

The room was hushed.

"How?"

* * *

**13 June 2027**

Ten years ago, they got married.

Nine years ago, their daughter died in their arms.

Eight years ago they couldn't bring themselves to celebrate.

Seven years ago she had a fever, so they had an excuse not to.

Six years ago she asked them why they were so sad on this day. They told her they didn't feel well, and she painted them both sunsets with watercolors.

Five years ago was the first time they tried. Dinner and a comedic movie to keep their spirits high while Adrien and Marinette watched her. Wine. Too much wine. Numbed the pain they were trying to hide.

Four years ago they had a little more success. Dancing in the garden on a warm clear night beneath a silver gibbous, they'd picked some marigold flowers and put them in a vase on the kitchen table, and it seemed to brighten the whole house. It was the first time they never talked about it.

Three years ago they were both trying to quit drinking, and neither gave in. They were proud of that.

Two years ago she made them a card, and they waited to cry until they were alone. They wouldn't have been able to explain why such a thing had that kind of power over them. Maybe it was the glowing smile on her face as she told them, "Happy Anniversary", unable to understand what exactly that meant to them. Unable to understand what it meant coming from her.

Last year they stayed in bed for a while. It was pouring rain and colder than normal. They laid silently in each other's arms until she came in practically yanking them onto their feet. Breakfast had been waiting for them for an hour.

Tonight they had planned something special. And they would have done it, had they not forgotten. Other things were on their minds. Really, the same things that were always there. Only today they were there louder and sharper. Some days were like that. It made Nathalie want to fall asleep. It made Gabriel want to disappear. It made Anaïs wish she had magical powers to make them feel better. But she couldn't tell them this. They didn't like when she talked about magic.

The word "anniversary" tasted like cake and blood, smelled like wine and rain. It sounded like a lullaby dying in the throat. It pressed as tight as the rings around their fingers and as hard as the weight of a lifeless body. It looked like a pair of eyes glittering with love and glee and then suddenly fading away.


	5. Chapter Five

Chapter Five

When Anaïs's parents told her that she died, it seemed the entire world had held its breath. The silence which followed their grave confession was so absolute, she wondered if she had suddenly gone deaf.

Several seconds elapsed, torturous seconds in which she just wanted something to move, someone to breathe, the planet to continue its rotation beneath the cool gray sky, flat as a sheet above their heads.

But it was something inside of her that shifted first, some heavy, unstable weight that gave way, and instead of crumbling down in a roiling crash of all the emotion she expected to feel, it all came drifting slowly, smoothly. Ana was overcome by this unanticipated rush of relief, this quiet mercy, and at last, she shut her eyes, inhaled a lengthy breath and sighed out a tired, "Ah."

She didn't want to say out loud that hearing this was somehow the greatest respite she could hope for, because she knew that to the rest of them it was another haunting memory. But in their eyes, despite the anguish they excavated through the recollection, she could see the faintest glimmer of the same ease that had washed across her, the comfort of a story coming to an end, the peace and the quiet and the stillness that defined the moment of losing something they barely knew, something they still had the power to shape into a better life.

"Anaïs," said Gabriel, taking his daughter's hand. She smiled at him, hoping to offer reassurance she knew he was in need of, to know that the image of him holding the sword that materialized in her head was not one that could change the way she saw him now, gazing at her with love and grief and hope. "We want you to know, if there's a part of you who will carry the weight of your other self now that you know the story, that despite how painful that experience was for all of us," he squeezed her fingers, "she saved us. She showed us who we were, and she showed us how we needed to change. If she knew that her actions had set us on the path of something better, I think she would have been glad."

They were difficult words to listen to after all the ones that had come before them, after all the tears and flashes of fear and memory across their faces, but Anaïs could hear the sincerity in her father's words, and even if it took time for her to believe them, she knew she would believe them eventually.

The Anaïs that had once been didn't exist anymore, but she wondered what it would have been like if she was somehow able to reach deep inside of herself to relay the message, if she could discover a hidden facet turned towards a different passage of time, look into the surface reflecting that version of who she could have been, and tell her everything she needed to hear. You did it. You saved them. You saved me. It still hurts, but it hurts a little less. It's dark, but we're following a light to lead us out. Maybe we'll make it.

If she was as stubborn and distrustful as she'd been described, maybe she wouldn't listen, but at least there was a piece of her that knew the truth. And at least it was the piece that survived. Anaïs would smile and tell her to take care and walk back the way she came out into the world her family changed, holding her at the center of it all.

Her mother watched her keenly, eyes blazing blue with wonder. Nearly seventeen years she had spent wondering how to tell the story, and now it was over. When asked how she was feeling, she leaned back in her chair with her chin tilted towards the ceiling and whispered, "Alive."

After this, Marinette offered to make everybody tea, and while nobody explicitly accepted, they all thanked her for the cups she passed around several minutes later. She and Adrien relocated to the dining room to sit alone and process together, all the late morning had forced them to confront, while Gabriel and Nathalie remained in the living room with nothing left to say. Anaïs sat with them, looking over her father's drawings and his dream journal entries, surprised by how many of them never mentioned her death at all.

The one which struck the deepest chord was a pair of sentences written when she was still just a baby, saying only, _It's mad that I already know the sound of her voice. I can't wait to hear her laugh in joy_.

Anaïs pressed a hand to her lips, realizing for the first time just how much it must mean to her parents just to see her happy.

* * *

**Two months later**

"Well, Myrtille, you've been with me for five years now."

The cat loudly meowed as she was scooped up into the arms of her owner, held like a baby being rocked in its mother's arms. Her fluffy gray tail flicked back and forth, nearly grazing Ana across the jaw.

"So tell me, girl, is this family anything like you thought it would be?"

Myrtille mewed again, quieter this time, eyes widely fixed on Anaïs's face.

"Yeah, not for me either."

She set the cat back on the floor, and Myrtille flopped down, exposing her downy belly fur and blinking up at Ana expectantly.

"Ah, fine, I suppose this is your day as well as mine."

Crouching down to pet her, Anaïs failed to notice at first that she wasn't alone in the hallway with her cat, but that somebody had just emerged from a bedroom and stood watching her quietly for a moment – where she squatted with her hair all wild and unbrushed from having just gotten out of bed, perhaps as base and unremarkable as she would ever appear to be – before they cleared their throat and prompted her to glance up.

"Oh, good morning, Mom," Ana said, continuing to stroke Myrille's belly.

"Good morning," replied Nathalie with a smile. Her hand was on the banister, prepared to travel down the stairs. "Happy Birthday."

"Thanks."

"Have you eaten anything yet?"

"Should I? We're going to Adrien and Marinette's for brunch."

"Not until eleven, so I would recommend at least eating something to tide you over until then."

"I think coffee will do it."

"In that case, come with me."

They descended to the kitchen together. Half a pot of coffee was waiting for them in the machine already, having been made a half hour earlier by Gabriel who was likely at work in his atelier for the morning. Anaïs handed her mother a pair of mugs to fill and they enjoyed their coffee black, each with half a teaspoon of sugar stirred in. Ana had definitely been introduced to caffeine far too young, but it had always been one of her favorite things about the weekend, that and sitting with her mother at the kitchen table in their pajamas talking about school or art or whatever else they wanted.

"Did you have any plans with Kari?" Nathalie asked, blowing on her mug.

"Yeah, they're going to take me to lunch tomorrow. And then we actually have an exam on Tuesday, so we'll probably just end up studying for that afterward," Anaïs answered.

"Sounds nice."

"Yeah, nothing special. Though, I've never needed much."

"Will you want something bigger for your eighteenth?"

"Well, I don't know, that's not for another year," Ana pointed out.

"You know I like to be as prepared as I can," said Nathalie.

Anaïs quirked an eyebrow. "Yet, I didn't even know we were having brunch until yesterday."

"Please, that isn't on us," Nathalie chuckled smiling over the rim of her mug, "Marinette's the one with the habit of getting things together last minute. One would think owning her own business would make her more organized with her time."

"Nonetheless, she always pulls through."

"How someone can be so reliable yet so stress-inducing at the same time, I will never understand."

"Honestly, it sounds like she fits in with us perfectly," Ana remarked.

"You have a point, but goodness, when you were younger, she took some getting used to. Especially for your father," Nathalie said. "He didn't appreciate her tendency to be late. But he adapted."

"Still complains behind her back," Ana pointed out, taking a sip.

"He'll complain behind anyone's back."

Anaïs replied, "But where is this same energy with Adrien? I know Dad thinks he can be too laid back – 'Chill, Dad, it's not a big deal'; meanwhile Dad's having an aneurysm – but somehow it's always Marinette's fault they're late? Sounds fishy."

"Careful, darling," Nathalie warned with a playful light in her gaze. "Or else you'll find out the kinds of things he says about you."

"Tell me anyway, what would those be?" Anaïs batted her eyes innocently.

"Stubborn." It was said so quickly and brusquely that Ana couldn't help but laugh. Nathalie grinned. "Even the mules are appalled."

Anaïs composed herself in order to swallow another mouthful of coffee, before she reached across the table to clasp her mother's hand. "You know, I really missed this."

Nathalie tilted her head. "What?"

"Seeing you smile, Mom."

Eyes flicking down, Nathalie removed her hand and wrapped rigidly it around her mug, and Anaïs worried for a second that she had just ruined the moment. It probably would have been better if she hadn't brought it up, if she hadn't made her mother think about why it was easier to be cheerful today (and conversely, why it was harder every other day). But though the smile she missed vanished for a heartbeat or two, it returned soft and sober, and Nathalie gave a small shrug of her shoulders.

"I didn't notice that it's been a while."

"I feel like you look even more like me when you smile."

"I feel you look even more like me with that hair," Nathalie countered. Ana reeled in surprise, for her hair, which she had just trimmed a few nights ago, hadn't been mentioned by anybody in the house since February.

"Yeah, I think so too," she softly agreed. For a pause, she stared into the dark surface of her drink, blinking at the reflection gazing back at her from below. "Well, it's – it's just nice to see you happy. Things have been kind of weird and heavy, you know. Today feels, I don't know, lighter."

"It does. I've been getting there." Tapping her nails against her mug, Nathalie went on, "They were a difficult two months, if I'm honest. It's…been strange to adjust to having everything out in the open now because nothing…nothing _really_ changes."

"No," Ana agreed solemnly.

"But I am better," Nathalie said, glancing up and broadening her smile. "I'm not perfectly well, but I'm better, and I'm optimistic."

Heart-warmed, Anaïs replied, "That's great, Mom."

"More than anything, I'm just so relieved you know the truth, and I know I haven't asked, because admittedly, I've been too afraid to, but are you okay, Ana?" Nathalie wondered.

It did feel weird to be asked that question, because following the day they told her the story, the Agreste family had kept closely to themselves regarding the encounter, addressing it vaguely with heavy-handed how-are-yous at the beginning of every conversation for about a week, to which nobody gave a very straight answer. And then elapsed two months of barely any acknowledgement at all. As Nathalie had said, there wasn't much that could have changed now that they all knew the same truth, the same story that happened but could never happen again, the story that affected them but wasn't really about any of them as much as it was about an idea of them hovering somewhere between fact and fiction.

Anaïs answered, "Yeah, I'm okay. It's not really the same for me."

"I know. I just want to make sure. It's a happy day, but I can't help but think, you know, you'd have been seventeen when your father would die." Nathalie shook her head. "And even though it won't happen, it's still on my mind. Every parent questions whether they're doing the right thing, but it's different when you've seen for yourself what could have happened if only you'd made one or two other choices instead."

"Oh, Mom," Ana said. "But you _have_ done the right thing. I don't want you to dwell on what you've already changed."

"I'm working on it." She paused and gazed at her daughter with dim and thoughtful eyes. "I want to make sure you work on it too. I don't want you to do what I do."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, this family has a very bad habit of blaming themselves for everything that goes wrong. Sometimes it's justified." Nathalie leaned her head into her hand. "But with this…"

"She wasn't me," Ana said. That was something she had come to believe not long after the story was told, when she looked herself in the face standing at the mirror hanging on her bedroom wall, seeking a glimpse of the stranger who used to inhabit her body. But Anaïs didn't see anybody other than herself. Even her father's drawings, while startling in the moment and unlikely to ever resurface for her own sake again, did not ultimately reconcile her own image with that of the woman on the paper. Tentatively, Anaïs admitted, "I think I do blame her. I blame her, and I blame Chrysalis, and I blame anybody else that was at fault, but none of those people are here today."

Nathalie looked over to the window, her expression pensive.

Ana continued, "And I know you said a lot of things about some of the pain in this coming from the fact that it has nowhere to go –"

"I don't really remember."

"I know, but," she tried to take her mother's hand again, reaching out and laying her fingers gingerly across the table, "But I'm trying to find some peace in the idea that all of those people are gone because we – because _you_ and Dad and Marinette and Adrien created something better for everyone."

Nathalie glanced back.

"Whatever part of me is angry at the other Anaïs for not listening to you," she explained, "is the same part of me that knows she's gone because I became someone different. And so in a way, those emotions aren't aimless. They transformed everything. _You all_ transformed everything. So even if I'm angry, I just need to remind myself," Ana smiled, "you already triumphed."

Her mother took her hand and pressed it between her own. "How did I get so lucky as to have a daughter as wise and forgiving as you?"

"You say that like you didn't raise me."

"Thank you, Anaïs," Nathalie murmured.

She held her mother's gaze for a moment, just to make sure that none of the joy and relief she had been so pleased to see was fleeting as she feared, but Nathalie, she realized, had been coming gradually out the darkness little by little, her blue eyes brightening even when a smile was absent, even when her voice was thick with the gel of memory congealed in her mind. The light in her stare, a light as free and vivid as the day, had already been there for quite some time, only illuminated further by her heartfelt grin.

They finished their coffee, and there was enough left in the pot for each of them to have another half a cup. Gabriel entered as they were stirring in the sugar, and after leaning over his wife to kiss her on the forehead and say good morning, he approached Anaïs, set his own empty mug on the table and pulled her to her feet for a hug.

"Happy Birthday, Baby Girl."

"Aw, don't call me that," she chuckled, scrunching her nose.

"What, is seventeen too old?"

"Maybe. I'm nearly an adult."

"Force of habit. You know when you were younger we called you that more often than we called you by your actual name." He stepped away and mimicked her grimace, deepening the wrinkles around his eyes, "And you did this all the time when you were mad. Don't tell me you're mad."

"Don't tell me you're being sentimental."

" _Tsk, tsk_. If we're being picky about nicknames now, all I'm going to ask is that you don't call me Grandpa when I turn sixty."

"That's fine, because I've been calling you that for a few years already," she joked as he went to set his mug in the sink.

"Thin ice, dear."

Nathalie laughed, and even Gabriel reacted to this by looking quickly over his shoulder and beaming at her, and despite those wrinkles on his face, he looked younger, revitalized by the flutter of joy on her tongue.

A couple hours later, after Anaïs had fed the cat and showered and curled her hair into loose raven ringlets, she strapped on a pair of heels that were wildly unnecessary for a small family brunch and arrived at Adrien and Marinette's house with her parents, of course, perfectly on time with Gabriel being the one in charge. At once, her niece and nephews stormed her, the twins attempting to climb her legs, and to humor them Anaïs collapsed onto the floor with a dramatic gasp.

"Attacking your aunt on her birthday! Well, aren't you a pair of troublemakers?"

Her niece, Emma had made her a card, which she handed over while Ana was still pinned to the front mat by the giggling twins. A bit of pink glitter sprinkled onto her face as she opened it and she blew a raspberry to make them laugh even harder.

"Boys! Give Auntie Ana some space to breathe," Marinette called.

She and Adrien handed Anaïs a birthday card of their own once she'd been released and gotten back to her feet, inside of which a gift card to her favorite bookstore was hiding. After thanking them, Ana offered to help Marinette with whatever was left of the cooking, but with a smile, her sister-in-law waved her out of the kitchen and told her to spend her birthday doing anything other than working.

"I know that's against your genetic makeup," she added, shooting a mischievous look at Gabriel and Nathalie.

The three of them stayed chatting in the kitchen, while Anaïs and Adrien returned to the living room to entertain the children. Emma kept herself occupied with a book, occasionally, impatiently popping in on her mother to ask, "Is it ready yet?" while her brothers played with superhero figurines in the center of the room. They mimicked explosions and power blasts with their mouths and argued incessantly over who got to play Ladybug and who got to play Chat. They didn't know about their parents yet.

Meanwhile, Anais leaned against the wall with her brother telling him about the self-portrait she was painting for her art class. A close-up of her face with one hand reaching off the canvas to polish one of her eyes as if it was made of glass, another holding her hair like yarn around a pair of knitting needles, both exhibiting wedding rings represent the hands of her parents.

"My whole idea is about how my parents shaped me," she was saying, "They've made me what I am physically, but there's obviously the whole symbolic layer of them making me who I am on a bunch of other levels as well. Nature and nurture, you get it. My teacher actually said she thought it was too unoriginal of a concept."

Adrien tilted his head. "Really?"

"Which is fair, I suppose. It's not exactly profound or unexpected to point out the fact you're the product of the people who raised you."

Pensively, Adrien sipped at his mimosa. "The profound and unexpected aspect of this can't really be explained, can it?" he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, they made you in the way that all parents make their children," he replied, gazing at his sons – carbon copies of their mother, "but they also made you quite deliberately – to be a person different from the example they'd already been shown."

Anaïs looked at her feet. "Yeah," she murmured, " 'Here's what not to do…'"

"I know art only means as much as the audience decides, but that's pretty cool, isn't it? That you get to save that secret in the work."

"I guess it's nice to have a place to put it."

"And no one will know. No one but us, anyway, and I think that's going to make us love it even more." Adrien nudged her lightly. "The detail about the hair is an _especially_ nice touch."

Ana smiled. Quickly glancing towards the kitchen, she leaned closer and said, "This morning, Mom told me my hair makes me look like her. It was the first time she mentioned it at all since before you told me the truth."

"By the way you're talking, that sounds like a good sign."

"She's better. Dad's better. They both seem happier. Lighter. Happy for each other too."

Adrien beamed. "I'm so glad to hear it. I – I haven't wanted to ask."

"I took a chance and pointed it out."

His green eyes flicked down momentarily. "Anaïs, can I let you in on a secret?"

"Another one?" she said with feigned exasperation, but when she noticed her brother's gaze was dimmer than it had been a few seconds ago, she tightened her expression and gently prompted, "What?"

Practically whispering, Adrien told her, "I used to wonder if they resented me for being the only one to have not watched you die."

"Oh –" Anaïs frowned and blinked the consternation out of her face. Adrien's confession startled her, but she pursed her lips, took a step back, and levelly asked, "Why?"

He stared across the room, fingernail softly tapping against the rim of his glass. "It was just one of those things I couldn't help thinking about from time to time. There was no perfect way to deal with this, not any way that I saw. What Dad and Nathalie had to witness, and Marinette too, that's not something I could ever truly understand. It – it set me apart from them, in a way. As awful as the situation was for everyone, I was so lucky not to have seen that."

"Adrien, they'd never have resented you for it."

"I didn't know for a long time, and it's not because I didn't trust them. When bad things happen to you, it's easy to feel bitter at the world for not having had to endure it too. I was the closest one they could point a finger at if they ever chose to point." He shrugged his shoulders, in such a way that it looked like he was trying to free himself of an ache or a weight. "It wasn't until we told you the truth that I was finally able to convince myself they didn't feel that way about me. My point is, I'd never been truly sure of everything until now, and I think that's worth celebrating."

"Adrien…"

"I know, it wasn't right of me."

"No, I understand," Anaïs assured him, offering a sympathetic smile. "It'd be hypocritical of me not to understand."

"That kind of pain is difficult to navigate," he grumbled, "What they went through, what all of us went through. Letting go is all about saying you're ready when you're not, surrendering the hurt only to take it back again, doing it over and over."

"How do you feel, Adrien?"

"I'm better too. At the very least, that's one less weight in my heart. I guess all of this is to say –"

Marinette yelled from the kitchen, "Okay, brunch is ready! Come get your plates!"

Warmth spread across his visage. The kids abandoned their toys and books and ran after the call for food. "If any of it means anything, then I think we're all going to be okay. I think we're all better off than we've been in years."

Anaïs believed it too. When she'd made it to the table with her plate piled high with numerous different pastries and sliced fruits, her fingers curled around the stem of her glass and she cleared her throat for her family to hear.

"What is it, birthday girl, are you going to make a toast?" Marinette asked.

"Not a toast. I just wanted to say…" Anaïs hoped the tears in her eyes wouldn't end up smudging her eyeliner, "Thank you, and I love you –"

"Oh, Ana," Gabriel murmured

"- and I'm so - so _proud_ of all of you," she emphasized, taking a moment to look all of them in the face. "So much prouder than words can express."

"Love," Nathalie whispered. "We're proud of you too."

They all look touched. Anaïs concluded with a wordless grin and sat to eat. Conversation centered around nothing remarkable, but Anaïs knew the light in her chest had been sparked by something fainter than that, something smaller and steadier, something like the change time takes in its passage, something like air coming clean to the lungs, something like the difference between falling and flying, the way the wind rises to catch you, the way you know not to be afraid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading everybody! I was so proud of this series, and I'm glad I got to add a little something extra at the end of it with this fic. I hope you enjoyed, my friends!

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment, loves! Thanks for reading! <3


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